


Harry Potter and the Expatriate Pioneeer

by ComradeTortoise



Series: Harry Potter And The Antifascist Waffenbrüder [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Communism, Death to Fascists, Dolores Umbridge is Her Own Warning, Gay Male Character, Gen, General Mature Themes, No I don't translate the German because it breaks immersion, Occassional German, PTSD, There is no war but class war, Torture, Transgender Affirming, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, Wholesome Weasleys, Wizarding Geopolitics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:35:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 63,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27851798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ComradeTortoise/pseuds/ComradeTortoise
Summary: It is the fifth year at Hogwarts, and a new student has arrived.  A 17 year old Muggleborn Communist from Wizarding East Germany who has to repeat two years of his education due to a combination of turmoil in his native country and unhelpful bureaucracy.  Lord Voldemort has returned, and the Specter of Fascism is haunting Konrad's new home.As my basis I am *mostly* but not entirely using the films, because it's easier.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks
Series: Harry Potter And The Antifascist Waffenbrüder [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2038914
Comments: 15
Kudos: 16





	1. Autumn Term

It was autumn, at night, in the mountains of the Scottish Highlands; and thus it was bitterly cold. Kondrad Albrecht stepped off the train and slipped the soft black rabbit fur of his ushanka over his head to keep the chill off his ears. He’d been on the train for hours and was getting more than a little bit irritable; but he was surrounded by children. Not just teenagers, but actual children, and he didn’t want to model bad behavior in front of them. So he waited for them to pass before he stepped off the platform and ducked behind one of the pillars. His right hand slipped into the pocket of his duster - NVA Surplus - and pulled out a hardpack of Juwel cigarettes. He’d had to apparate back to Germany to stock up because he’d have to ration while at Hogwarts, but they were worth it, better than anything he’d get in this capitalist hellscape. 

He put the filter to his lips and used a flick of his wand to light it, taking in a long and much-needed drag and exhaling slowly. It was foul-tasting and glorious.

“Mein Gott, Ich haße dieses Land,” he muttered to himself before he heard a commotion on the platform above him; a voice in a spiteful tone and upper-crust accent shouting at someone else. 

“I’m surprised the ministry’s still letting you walk around free, Potter! You better enjoy it while you can. I expect there’s a cell in Azkaban with your name on it.” One boy teasing another was one thing, but wishing the British dementor-prison on them? That was a bit much. Konrad stepped out so he could see what was happening and readied his wand by pure reflex. The other boy, shorter but a bit more heavily built with messy brown hair and round spectacles lunged forward at the taunt. His friend, a ginger boy of about the same build held him back, while their young lady companion stood back and rolled her eyes. 

“What’d I tell you? Complete nutter!” One of the rich boys - and he was definitely rich from the suit and that made Konrad hate him immediately and take the other boy’s side - said. 

“Just stay away from me!” Their target shouted at the backs of the rich assholes as they retreated, and Konrad lowered his wand. Which was when he got caught. 

“Does anyone smell cigarette smoke?” The young lady asked, clearly just to make sure she wasn’t insane but then she looked right at Konrad. He could actually see her now. Probably around fourteen, with unruly brown hair, looking at him like he’d grown a second head.

“Ah, Scheiße.” He took another drag, simply not caring anymore.

“You know you’re not supposed to do that, right? It’s bad for you! They can give you cancer you know!” She was completely outraged. Konrad exhaled and took in a very long and long-suffering drag before he stubbed it out and field-stripped it. It wouldn’t do to litter. 

“I know.” He replied. “I am counting on it.” That line caused her pause because she probably hadn’t expected her interlocutor to embrace a wasting death.

“Are you a transfer from Durmstrang?” The young lady asked, almost sounding hopeful like she could maybe ask after a friend she had there? Konrad couldn’t be sure.

“No.” He motioned for the three of them to walk along the platform so he could join them on the carriages some thirty meters away. They did. “I transferred from the…” he had to translate into English for their benefit “Markus Wolf Special Pioneers Institute in East Germany.” He still didn’t want to call it former East Germany. “I’m also a seventh year student who has to repeat my fifth and sixth year. So if I come off as bitter, you understand, ja?”

The young lady’s eyes got a bit wide when he mentioned Markus Wolf, which didn’t surprise him in the slightest; but she also looked sympathetic at his overall situation. She tried to open her mouth to speak but couldn’t seem to figure out what to say. Honestly, it was the thought that counted. She gave a shit, that was enough; even if she just didn’t know how to even approach that topic. The other young man, the one with the glasses, nodded. He understood something about what that meant. Konrad pegged them for muggleborns who were raised outside the strangely isolated culture that was Wizarding Britain; and thus had some geopolitical clue.

“So wot, is that Wolf Institute or whatever not up to snuff or something?” That was the Ginger. Clearly not the brightest crayon in the box. Or more likely, just raised entirely within the Wizarding world. And if the young lady could have stabbed him with daggers from her eyes, she would have done it. Konrad took it in stride. Bitter, yes, but he wanted to make some kind of good impression.

“No. However, Wizarding East Germany and West Germany did not unite as easily as the muggles. This has caused... problems.” He wasn’t about to talk about the details, not with strangers. 

“Bollocks mate, I’m sorry.” The ginger apparently felt bad. 

“Es ist egal, er, It’s okay. Well, it’s not, but I’ll survive.” A sideways glance “Unless the cancer gets me first, Wenn Gott barmherzig ist.” Konrad offered the ginger his hand. “Konrad Albrecht.” 

“Ron Weasley.” Ron shook Konrad’s hand. He thought it would be wobbly, but it wasn’t. The shake was firm. Then the girl butted in. 

“Hermione Granger.” Stiff and awkward on the shake itself, but it was firm in the hands. 

“Harry Potter” He was last, and the handshake was perfunctory. Like he had something on his mind. But then, the so-called Boy Who Lived would. He’d read the Daily Prophet every day since he’d gotten into the country. Utter propaganda, but he knew how to read between the lines of propaganda.

“Ah. A pleasure to meet you. And it seems now I know why that other boy, the rich asshole, was taunting you.” Harry stopped in his tracks. “I do believe you, Harry. News of his death crossed the Iron Curtain, and sometimes death doesn’t take. Just ask Rasputin. He took a lot more killing than was normal. Even for a wizard.”

Harry relaxed perceptibly. “You’re not going to start fawning over me are you?”

“Why would I do that? You were a baby, it’s not like you fought him in a duel and killed him. Something strange made his spell backfire and killed him for a while. Come on, we should get on the carriage before the Thestrals get bored.” Their carriage had arrived. Konrad saw the creatures pulling it as a kind of bat-winged nigh-skeletal horse with a vulture’s head. 

“The what?” Ron asked. 

“Yeah, what are you talking about? The carriages are pulling themselves just like they always have.” Hermione followed up, incredulous. 

“I… I’ve never seen those before.” Harry was astonished. “And you can see them too, but not you two?”

Konrad couldn’t bring himself to tell the poor boy. 

Which was when a fifth voice piped up, softly but able to cut through the distraction and get everyone’s attention. “Don’t worry you’re not going mad. I can see them too, you’re just as sane as I am.” Which would have been comforting to everyone if she didn’t also sound like she was mentally distant and reading a book upside down. She was very small, and extremely pale like she avoided all sunlight. They got on the carriage.

“Everyone; this is Loony Love… Luna Lovegood.” Hermione caught herself clearly using a derogatory nickname without meaning to, and she looked affronted by the fact that she did it. “What an interesting necklace.”

“It’s a charm actually.” Luna said, displaying the small bauble on the end. “Keeps away the Nargles.” Which were things that did not exist, which lead Konrad to conclude one of two things was true. Either she really was slightly insane; or she recognized the absurdity of the world and was having some fun with it. Either way, Konrad decided that he liked her, and he did something he hadn’t done since he got on the damned train. He smiled. 

* * *

When they arrived at the absolutely massive castle-like structure, Konrad couldn’t help it. He was impressed. The architecture bent his mind, and he was used to some really surreal wizard-constructed brutalism. However he’d had to break off from his new, he supposed possible-friends, and join the first years for sorting into his ‘house’, which he took to mean some sort of team or grouping. The first years were all of eleven years old, and he towered over them. Some of them barely even came up to his chest, and he’d been forced to shed the jacket and ushanka in favor of the school uniform. He was accustomed to uniforms though, so that didn’t bother him in the slightest. Luckily, with his last name he was right up near the top of the list. 

“Konrad Albrecht.” An elderly woman in an actual pointed hat called his name in a scottish brogue and he strode up to the stool where the sorting hat sat. It was an old leather thing that spoke in the voice of a crotchety old man, and when it was placed on his head he felt something crawling into his thoughts. Then it spoke. Not in his mind, but audible to everyone.

“Hmmm, don’t see many transfer students. And from so far away too. I could put you just about anywhere, you know. So tell me Mr. Albrecht, what house do you want to go to?”

 _‘I don’t have the slightest idea.’_ Konrad answered back, strictly in his head. _‘Perhaps a different question would help you decide? Or is the decision mine?’_

“A bit of both. I take what you want into account but if you just don’t have the intellect for Ravenclaw - which you do have - or the raw drive for Slytherin, well, I can’t help with that. The problem is you’d be a good fit anywhere. So what actually drives you Mr. Albrecht, what do you want?”

“I am a communist. I want to help the working people of the world rise up against their oppressors, to cast down the tyranny of Capital and the Bourgeois state; abolish all social distinctions of race, class, and gender; between muggle, wizard, and thinking magical creature.” Never one to shy away from his beliefs, Konrad said that out loud. The hat hmmmmed at him, and considered. So he looked out at the other students. 

“Certainly ambitious enough for Slytherin…” Somehow, probably thanks to the hat, he knew which of the bench-tables the Slytherins were. They were, in the main, glaring at him with undisguised hatred. He knew reactionaries when he saw them. 

“Not there.” Konrad said. “Either they or I would be dead inside a week.” which he definitely said very much out loud. The hat then decided on discretion, and stopped speaking out loud; even if he couldn’t prevent certain thoughts and associations from leaking into his thoughts.

 _‘Not Slytherin then. Definitely not there. Even if you’d fit, I’m not permitted to put students at risk like that. And with that mouth you’re probably too cantankerous for Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw would fit given the library you brought with you; but you seem more the applied knowledge type.’_ The hat, which seemed to enjoy British understatement, paused and he could feel it rummaging through his mind. _‘And you find show-boating heroism to be...decadent. So I have to ask, where would you like to go?’_

The hat gave him the general rundown. It was right, the Hufflepuffs got things done through collective action, he liked that; but his temperament was not especially suitable even if his ideology was. He’d be a bad influence. Best to keep their hands clean, because his probably wouldn’t be if the Slytherin table’s facial expressions were any indication. The Ravenclaws were bookworms. He had a collection of Marxist literature, and they would probably make good Trotskyites. But that was the problem. All arcane theory, no praxis. 

_‘Heh. Arkane Theorie.’_ he chuckled at his own pun. The hat groaned inside his head. He checked the Gryffindor table. Harry, Ron, Hermione; they were all there. And if the evening’s earlier interaction were any indication, the reactionaries hated them. Then he remembered. Voldemort was back. It stood to reason that the reactionaries would side with the blood-purist dark wizard. Ergo, the person who’d accidentally killed the now-undead fascist wizard would be their enemy.

 _‘Gottverdammt. Jemand mu_ ss _sicherstellen, da_ ss _Harry nicht stirbt.’_ He thought. _‘Gryffindor it is. Though I must inform you I oppose dividing students into houses like this on ideological grounds.’_ He mentally told the hat. 

“GRYFFINDOR!” The sorting hat loudly and joyously proclaimed, to the clapping and cheers - albeit in some cases somewhat nervous clapping and cheers - of the other people at the table. He walked over to where Harry and the others were sitting. There was a gap of icy silence between Harry and another boy, which gave him room to sit. 

“Hallo Leute.” Konrad greeted everyone, and he did actually smile genuinely. “Pleasure to meet everyone.” 

The sorting ceremony went fairly quickly after that. Most eleven year olds were relatively simple for the hat to classify so it wasn’t long before it got through the hundred or so of them. A massive feast magically appeared at the table, apparating in from somewhere and everyone tucked in and began stuffing their faces. 

Konrad didn’t know what to make of it. It was so lavish that it was an outside context problem; he’d seen poor and homeless people in London. Hungry children. Food couldn’t be conjured so this bounty had to be grown and then prepared, which left him wondering who did the cooking.

“Ich bin ein Fremder in einem fremden Land…” 

“What is it? Not used to this much food?” Hermione asked. Somewhere between genuine curiosity and poking at him for being a communist. He didn’t rise to the bait.

“Yes. We sacrificed luxury for the few in order to provide enough for everyone. This much food would feed a broken coal mining town in Wales for a month.”

“Screw Thatcher!” One a bit farther down the table toward the sorting ceremony said. He was a bit mousy and carried a camera around his neck. Konrad privately made a note to pass him a copy of the Manifesto. Das Kapital might be a bit much for him. 

“Prost!’ Konrad replied, grinning and raising a glass of whatever the sweet cloying beverage he was drinking was. 

Old friends were catching up old friends and welcoming new ones; the atmosphere was amiable and Konrad couldn’t help himself but enjoy it. At least a little bit. He was finding himself needing a smoke though, an activity he knew was far more frowned on in a british boarding school than it was back home. He would just have to treat it like nighttime light-discipline and deal with it. 

Then came the tapping on crystal glass. A man in grey robes with a long beard was standing at a podium that hadn’t been in the great hall a moment prior and started speaking. Konrad concluded that he had to be Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster. 

“Good evening, children. Now, we have two changes in staffing this year. We’re pleased to welcome back Professor Grubbly-Plank,” He motioned toward a man behind him at the staff table who was missing a leg “who will be taking care of Magical Creatures while Professor Hagrid is on temporary leave. We also wish to welcome our new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Delores Umbridge.” 

Down on the far right of the staff table, past the elderly woman in the conical hat who’d done the sorting, past the man in black who looked like he wanted to be anywhere but there; sat a woman. She was dressed in all pink, with a grin on her face that didn’t reach her eyes. There was something fundamentally wrong about her expression. She let out a tittering little giggle, and that’s when Konrad recognized it. The expression of a cat that was playing with it’s still-living food. 

Professor Dumbledore went on “And I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing the professor good luck. As usual, our caretaker Mr. Filch, has asked me to remind you...”

Professor Umbridge interrupted Dumbledore with a little “Ahem” and he stopped his announcements, stunned at the temerity of it; he looked like he wanted to respond but thought better of it. Everything went dead silent. All attention turned to her as she stood up and took Dumbledore’s place at the podium. 

“She was at my hearing. She works for Fudge.” Harry said to Hermione, and that’s when Konrad understood. He knew Fudge was the Minister for Magic, and he was in full damage control mode. She was a piece on his chessboard. Knight, Bishop, Pawn, Rook, or Queen Konrad didn’t know. And he didn’t know the state of play, either. There was something about her, alarm bells screamed in his mind, alarm bells that he’d learned to trust. He leaned toward Harry and spoke in hushed tones.

“Tell me everything when we get back to the barracks.” Harry gave him a look when he used the term barracks, and Konrad shrugged.

“Thank you, Headmaster, for those kind words of welcome. And how lovely to see all your bright, happy faces. Smiling up at me.” No one was smiling. Exactly no one. “I’m sure we’re all going to be very good friends.” There was some skeptical muttering, especially at the Gryffindor table. “The Ministry of Magic has always considered the education of young witches and wizards to be of vital importance. Although each headmaster has brought something new to this historic school,” she nodded to Dumbledore in acknowledgement of his position, which belied the fact that she’d insulted him by interrupting him “progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged.” She seemed to glare directly at Konrad as she said it too. “Let us preserve what must be preserved, perfect what can be perfected, and prune practices that ought to be prohibited.” That last word she said in a stage whisper; and she punctuated the whole creepy speech with a little giggle that a child might make when tearing the wings off a fly. 

When she walked back to her seat, Dumbledore clapped first. Everyone else followed, but it was the kind of clapping that came from the person leaving, not what they’d said. Except for the Slytherins and Mr. Filch. Konrad made a note in his head to be careful of that one. She was far far too familiar. She reminded him of the sort of people he and his classmates called the Faust-gesellshaft.

“Thank you Professor Umbridge. That really was most illuminating.”

“Illuminating? What a load of waffles.” Ron protested in hushed tones, interspersed with Dumbledore.

“Now as I was saying, magic is forbidden in the corridors.” Dumbledore continued, but Konrad wasn’t paying attention.

“What’s it mean?” Harry asked Hermione. She pursed her lips as Dumbledore continued his announcements. Harry wasn’t thick, but this was something new to him and he just didn’t have the base of experience to understand what was going on. 

“It means the ministry is interfering at Hogwarts.” She replied, and she sounded terrified. Konrad definitely agreed. 

“In the worst way. She’s a,” Konrad had to look for the word to describe it and decided that there just wasn't a good equivalent to Nomenclatura. “She’s been sent by the Ministry to monitor, report on, and if she can control what goes on here. Whether she’s a true believer or ideologically agnostic opportunist, I don’t know.”

All three turned and gave him a look. “What?” Konrad asked. “I’m not… unfamiliar with her type.” They had no idea what that meant, but something in Konrad actually came alive. It wasn’t a good thing, but it was familiar, and he tried to put on a brave face about it. “Honestly I feel like I’m back home!”

“You’re bloody insane, you know that right?” Ron asked.

“I’m German. Of course I am.”

* * *

When the announcements and meal were over, everyone lined up like ducklings to follow the 7th year house prefects to their various wings. While they walked, Ron and Hermione filled him in on the prior four years in brief. Harry tried to minimize his contribution. He didn’t want to be a hero, and didn’t like puffing himself up; but he was one evidently. If only because he stepped up when the adults were idiots. And they were almost all of them idiots. 

There was a password to get into the Gryffindor commons, which Konrad memorized, and then everyone slowly filed inside. It took long enough to get inside that by the time his little group with Ron, Hermione and Harry entered, people were already milling about to become completely silent when Harry entered the room. It wasn’t the good kind of respectful silence either, but the suspicious kind. 

One of the boys, who looked to be about Harry’s age, was sitting down in a chair reading the daily prophet. The headline was ‘Potter’ and then the text changed to ‘Plotter?’. The boy reading it gave Harry a look that would wither plants. 

“Dean, Seamus, good holiday?” Harry asked. He sounded hurt and confused. He was used to a warmer reception. Dean was black, not many of those in Germany, but Konrad tried not to stare or pay it any attention. No racial hierarchies afterall. 

“Alright.” Dean replied. “Better than Seamus’s anyway.”

Seamus, the boy who had given Harry about two meters of distance at the table, heavily put the paper down as he got up and stalked toward Harry like he wanted a fight. “Me mum didn’t want me to come back this year.”

“Why not?” Harry asked.

“Hm, let me see, uh, because you.” Seamus replied, his hands were balled up into fists and the other student’s backed away to make space. “The Daily Prophet’s been saying a lot of things about you, Harry, and about Dumbledore as well.”

“And your mum believes them?” Harry asked, completely dumbstruck because believing them would be insane. 

“Well, nobody was there the night Cedric died.” Seamus was just shy of accusing him of murder.

“Well maybe you should read the Prophet then like your stupid mother. It’ll tell you everything you need to know.” Harry finally snapped back. 

“Don’t you dare talk about me mother like that!” Seamus was just about to lose his cool.

“I’ll have a go at anyone that calls me a liar.” Harry’s tone was becoming icy cold and there was about to be violence. 

“What’s goin’ on?” Ron came out of the lavatory confused. Seamus replied, but kept himself fixed on Harry.

“Do you believe the rubbish he’s come out with about You-Know-Who?” Seamus asked, pointedly. 

“Yeah. I do.” To his credit, Ron didn’t hesitate. 

“I do too, actually.” Konrad finally joined in. He’d had enough, he wouldn’t tolerate this kind of bullying. He strode over to the table and picked up that edition of the Prophet. “The Daily Prophet is simply the worst propaganda I’ve ever seen. Propaganda is an art and,” he looked at the byline on the article “Rita Skeeter flunked out of art school so hard you can cut diamonds with her failure.”

Fred and George Weasley, a pair of very much ginger identical twins who were Ron’s older brothers, snickered in the back, and Seamus gave him a withering stare and turned to face him. Konrad was admittedly letting his nicotine craving get the better of him a little bit, because a stance like that, the set of his jaw, it was begging for a right hook. But he didn’t give in. He set his body stance to complete neutrality. He wasn’t concerned with the juvenile.

“They wouldn’t be trying this hard to discredit someone who wasn’t right.” Konrad continued evenly, flicking the tabloid contemptuously before setting it down. With a nod of his head, he motioned for Ron and Harry to go upstairs, which they did. 

“Why don’t you mind your own business, foreigner?” Seamus demanded. He was inching closer. 

“I live here now, that makes it my business.” Konrad sighed again. He got the feeling he would be doing a lot of that, but he softened his tone. “Look, maybe he is _wrong_ , but he’s had to fight for his life every year he’s been here. Hasn’t he?”

The room nodded and shrugged, because that part was beyond dispute. 

“Aye, Aye he has.” Seamus agreed. 

“And nothing about this year is shaping up differently. So maybe some benefit of the doubt ist in ordinung, ja? At least enough to not make him feel unsafe where he sleeps?”

Seamus looked like he wanted to continue for a second, but deflated. “Yeah.”

“Good. Does anyone else have a problem with Harry, Me, or anyone else?” No one said anything, and after a second, went back to what they were doing before. That gave Konrad the opening he wanted to trudge up the spiral staircase to the boy’s common bedroom. 

“I said I’m fine Ron!” Harry was lashing out. Konrad couldn’t hear what Ron said in response but when he finally got up there, Harry was sitting down with a thousand-yard stare. Konrad knew enough to not mess with someone when they were in that kind of state so he hunted around looking for where his stuff had been brought up. He still didn’t know who did the bringing, but a magical castle was a magical castle. Maybe they had staff? He’d never been in a place with that kind of service staff, but it was a concept he was familiar with. 

What he needed was his coat. When he’d taken it off and changed, he’d been told to just store his stuff in the front room on the benches and it would all get sorted. He’d expected a pile of stuff, but no. On one of the beds in the unaccountably large circular room he found it neatly folded. His rucksack that contained the rest of his possessions was also neatly placed on the duvet. He slipped on the greatcoat that went down to below his knees, buttoned it up and then put on the ushanka, tying the ears down around his cheeks to keep his ears warm. Then he crossed the room and out a set of double doors to the balcony. It had a sturdy stone railing that was about waist high, so he sat on it and very carefully swung his legs out to dangle over the ledge. 

The landscape was certainly different from the streets of East Berlin, and beautiful. The moon reflected off the lake hundreds of meters below, casting shadows throughout the forbidden forest. There were more stars in the sky than he’d ever been able to see in his entire life. There was just one thing that could make it better. It wasn’t even conscious at that point. One minute he was breathing in fresh mountain air, and the next breath was hot on his tongue and made the jitters go away. 

Konrad felt the presence move up beside him and glanced to his left, upwind, to see Ron. 

“Thanks.” Ron said. “For sticking up for Harry like that.” 

Konrad shrugged. “No problem.” 

“Why’d you do it though? You just met him, us. Doing that didn’t earn you many friends, least of all Seamus.” Ron was honestly confused.

“He’s got people - including dead people - trying to kill him constantly. Your oppressive bourgeois state has it in for him personally, apparently. I’ll stand up for anyone in those straits. He deserves to have a place that’s safe. And I did sort of intentionally put myself into a position to make that happen.”

“Wot mate? You mean with the sorting hat? You had something of a talk with it; tried to put you in Slytherin like it did Harry.”

“Ja. They’re a problem.” Konrad took a long drag on his cigarette to give himself time to organize his thoughts. He exhaled. “I saw what they were like as soon as I got off the train, and you couldn’t see the way they looked at me when I was in the hot-seat. Not my people.”

Ron gave him an appraising look, like he was sizing Konrad up or trying to figure him out.

“Who are your people, exactly? It’s not like we’re all… communists. I don’t think I know what a communist is but it all seems a bit barmy.” Ron wasn’t trying to be mean, that much was in his voice. He just didn’t have much exposure to muggle politics at all. 

“Anyone who works for a living in some way or another and contributes positively to the society in which they live. But not people who hurt or parasitize others. The whole house-system is bullshit. It divides the decent people up, pits them against one another for that ridiculous house cup, and keeps them from recognizing their true enemy.”

“An’ who’s that?”

“Here? The parasites and class-traitors in Slytherin House, if I don’t miss my mark. Maybe the staff, or some of them at least.” He took another quick drag from the cigarette and exhaled. The memories of that thought were not good. “More broadly…” He gave Ron a once over. His uniform wasn’t new, it was handed down probably from one of his older brothers; the threads were worn, and it wasn’t tailored to fit. “You come from a poor family, ja?”

Ron gave him a withering look for that question which was all he needed to know. “What’s it to you?” 

“There is no shame in that, Ron. None. I imagine your parents work quite hard for everything your family has. And yet, there are people who do nothing but grow fat on the labor of others. People like that boy who was taunting Harry earlier?”

“Draco Malfoy, yeah.” Ron confirmed, nodding in understanding. “His family is ancient, got their land from William the Conqueror and kept getting richer. His father Lucius Malfoy,” he practically spat the name “he was a Deatheater and managed to avoid Azkaban. Claimed he was under the Imperius Curse, but he’s an occlumens so it couldn’t be checked with legilimency. Awful convenient that is.” Ron sounded incredibly bitter about that, and Konrad just nodded. 

“The enemy.” was all he said before finishing off his cigarette. 

* * *

Konrad’s first period of the day was Defense Against the Dark Arts; which evidently covered both anti-monster and anti-wizard combat magic. In Germany it was different, those things were two entirely separate subjects because it was - entirely sensibly in his view - not actually possible to adequately cover both the magic required for dueling and mass combat, and the more specialized knowledge that was required to combat vampires, werewolves, and bogarts. So despite sitting down at his desk with his notebook, quill, and thermos of coffee; he wasn’t really taking it seriously. 

And neither was anyone else. One of the Parvati Twins - he hadn’t really figured out how to tell the two identical twins apart, it has been less than twenty-four hours - made a delightful paper swallow that was flying around the room to amuse the other students. Seamus hit it with an open palm and it kept fluttering about while the other students giggled and laughed. Someone launched a rubber band at it. Then it unceremoniously burst into flames and fell to its doom on the Parvati Twins shared desk. 

That got everyone’s attention and everyone turned around to face the back of the class; Konrad was up at the front and couldn’t have seen the pink-clad Professor Umbridge enter the room. Even the people in the back hadn’t seen her. Professor Umbridge was still wearing the exact same pink dress and cardigan vest she’d been wearing the day prior. Konrad didn’t know which option he found the most disturbing; that she owned multiple identical outfits, or that she laundered the same one over and over again. 

She lowered her wand with almost textbook-perfect poise with a smug little grin on her face. “Good morning, children.” Like she was talking to kindergarteners rather than a rowdy classroom full of teenagers. As she strode on high-heels toward the front of the class, she extended her wand again to levitate a piece of chalk to write on the board in perfect English cursive. An acronym. “Ordinary Wizarding Level examinations. O-W-Ls, more commonly known as OWLs” She read aloud, as if the fifteen year old students were illiterate. “Study hard, and you will be rewarded. Fail to do so, and the consequences may be severe.” 

Professor Umbridge flicked her wand again, to begin distributing large textbooks to each student. Each one titled ‘Dark Arts Defense Basics For Beginners’. Which Konrad thought was absolutely fucking insane. These were fifth year students. That was the title of a book you gave to eleven year old first year students, not the more advanced textbooks you would use to prepare students for their diploma examinations to see if they would advance to Gymnasium. Even looking at the cover art was insulting and mind-bending: two obvious children looked at the same book he was looking at, and it was recursive. They receded into infinity. Konrad hoped that this was just a refresher on things they might have forgotten since their first year. He prayed that was true. The alternative was his worst nightmare. Boredom and a disarmed student body.

She kept going. “Your previous instruction on this subject has been disturbingly uneven. But you’ll be pleased to know that from now on, you will be following a carefully structured, Ministry approved course of defensive magic.”

Hermione was already looking through the table of contents and rapidly paging through the book, even before the professor was done speaking. She raised her hand, with a look of concern that Konrad figured mirrored his own. 

“Yes?” Professor Umbridge didn’t like being interrupted in class, but she still had to answer questions.

“There’s nothing in here about using defensive spells.” It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement. Konrad cracked the book open and looked through it. He focused on the protective spells like shield charms, and there was no instruction. It mentioned them, but there were no wand movement diagrams, no phonetic pronunciations for the incantation, no arithmantic breakdowns that would allow someone to modify the basic spell. Nothing. 

“Using spells?” Professor Umbridge asked like it was absolutely stupid that fifth year students actually learn how to use magic. She even laughed derisively at the very concept. “Well I can’t imagine why you would need to use spells in my classroom.”

Ron piped up next, completely dumbfounded. “So we won't be using magic at all?” 

The professor had obviously not accounted for the idea that she would actually be challenged by students. “You will be learning about defensive magic in a secure and risk-free way.”

“Well, what use is that?” Harry asked. “If we’re going to be attacked, it won’t be risk free.”

Professor Umbridge retreated to her own formal authority. “Students will raise their hands when they speak in my class.” She turned her back on them and stepped up to the raised position of the dais at the front of the room, then turned around again. “It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge is sufficient to get you through your examinations, which, afterall are what school is all about.”

Konrad's eye involuntarily twitched.

Harry interjected, and Konrad was getting worried that this might escalate. If she was at his hearing and worked for the minister, she might use this against him somehow. “And how’s theory going to prepare us from what’s out there?”

“There is nothing out there, dear. Who do you imagine would want to attack children, like yourself.”

Harry was about to respond, but Konrad quickly turned around and gave him a quelling glance. Harry saw it, and visibly restrained himself. Konrad decided to take the argument’s next steps to see how far Umbridge could be pushed. 

“Dementors, basilisks, werewolves, Deatheaters in disguise, deranged Defense Against The Dark Arts Instructors.” All of which had happened on the grounds of Hogwarts in the past four years; Hermione had been _very_ complete in her description. “To say nothing of certain dark wizards who seem to crop up in this country from time to time.” He didn’t say the word, but the implication was clear. 

She looked like she was wanting to respond one way, but decided on responding in another. “Now let me make this… quite plain. You have been told that a certain dark wizard is at large once again. That. Is. A. Lie.” She looked directly at Harry, who rose to the bait that Konrad had tried to redirect his own way.

“It’s not a lie! I saw him! I fought him!”

“Detention, Mr. Potter!”

“Even if he’s wrong, Professor, it’s pretty obvious that the Ministry is completely delusional about the risk students at this school face, if the Tri-Wizarding Tournament results in murder by a known deatheater!” Konrad was trying to draw her ire to him. Ire he could see rising.

“ENOUGH!” She shrieked, finally losing all composure before regaining it and letting out that tittering chuckle, but the smile reached her eyes this time. She was preparing for something she would actually enjoy. “See me later Mr. Potter, Mr Albrecht. My office.” A grin of pure sadism spread across her face. Konrad had some ideas about what she had in store.

Harry was fuming throughout the rest of the class, Hermione and Ron were exchanging concerned glances, but no one offered further argumentation. Instead, it was dry and silent reading from a book that was both terribly written and a cruel joke. When class was dismissed he and Harry were the last ones out, and Umbridge giggled as she watched them pass. 

“I don’t like the sound of that giggle.” Konrad said to Harry, who wheeled on him. 

“Why did you get involved at all?!” It wasn’t a shout, but it was forceful. Konrad looked around and found a little nook they could get to for a bit of privacy. He motioned wordlessly for Harry to join him in it. 

“Harry, I’m trying to keep you alive. You’re a good person, I can tell that. And you fight fascists.” Was what he told Harry, straight up. “ _Think_ about what’s going on. The Ministry sent dementors to assassinate you. What’s the next step?”

“No, no that can’t be. That had to have been Voldemort…” Harry was hung up on that, and it was admittedly speculation on his part.

“Who has friends in the Ministry, you _must_ know that. Lucius Malfoy, Ron told me about him. What happened after?” Konrad pressed.

“The hearing. It was…” Harry searched for a word “a star-chamber. She was there, she voted against me, towed Fudge’s line no matter what the evidence was.”

“And now she’s here. What’s the next step? What would you do if you were trying to neutralize a student, but you had to keep your hands clean?”

“Get him expelled…” Harry realized “Then he wouldn’t have the protection of the school, and I could do whatever I liked without anyone noticing. But the Ministry wouldn’t do that. Fudge is in denial and terrified, but he’s not evil. Is he?”

“The left hand doesn’t need to know what the right hand is doing. He might not be evil, but she is. You can see it in her eyes.” Konrad said. “I’ve seen that look before.”

After a long pause Harry asked a question that hit Konrad like a sledgehammer. “What happened to you back home?”

He whispered. “There’s a reason I can see Thestrals... Look, there are always people willing to sell out principle for power, wealth, prestige. It doesn’t matter what country, they all have them. After the wall fell, my country was on borrowed time...”

Harry knew enough about the muggle side of the Cold War to find that immensely confusing because there was no Global Studies curriculum, it was written all over his face. “After? Not before?”

Konrad was trying really hard not to relive things he’d rather not remember without a bottle of schnapps. “Not right now. Not in public. Later, we’ll sit down, I’ll break out the schnaps, and we’ll talk.”

Harry gave him the side-eye. “You’re a bad influence.”

“Probably, but a bad influence who understands something of what you’ve gone through. Come on, we should get to Transfiguration or Professor McGonagall will string us up by our ankles.” He clapped Harry amiably on the shoulder, and they headed off to their next class.

* * *

Transfiguration was a marked departure from their prior class. Professor McGonagall took her subject with the full seriousness it deserved, because it was incredibly dangerous. On the first day of class, she did a quick review of Gamp’s Law, and jumped right into new and interesting spells. For instance, he learned how to transfigure himself into an armchair. Konrad figured that would be useful as a kind of urban camouflage. Excellent for espionage. 

“Mr. Albrecht, would you stay for a moment?” McGonagall asked, in the polite but clipped tones he was growing accustomed to. She didn’t seem angry or anything. 

“Of course Professor.” As everyone else filed out, he stood ramrod straight at parade rest. “What can I do for you?”

“You can relax Mr. Albrecht, you aren’t in any trouble.” She replied with an amused little smirk. Konrad relaxed and let his shoulders slump a touch. “We didn’t really have a chance to talk yesterday. As the head of Gryffindor House, I am responsible for guiding your education and your record is…interesting. I can imagine it must be difficult for you, in a new country, speaking in a foreign language. Having to repeat - I think unjustifiably - two years of school. I was wondering if there was anything I could do to make the adjustment easier.”

Kondrad couldn’t help it, he chuckled even though he might be considered rude. “Sorry, Professor. You’re just the first adult in any kind of position of authority who hasn’t treated me like a dullard or ignored the, what is the term? Elephant in the room, I think is the idiom.” He had to think for a moment. “For me, honestly? I could use things that are a bit more difficult. I am fully capable of Conjurations, professor. I understand those are not generally taught here until later.”

“Show me. Take out your wand and use a conjuration to stop what I’m about to do.” She commanded. He took out his wand and held himself at the ready. Then, without ceremony she picked up the candelabra at her desk and threw it behind her at the huge window that backlit her desk. 

Konrad thought very fast and swung his wand with a circular twist of his wrist “Ebublio!” 

The candelabra became encased and trapped in a soft squishy and completely unbreakable bubble of energy that caused it to bounce harmlessly off the window like a beachball and then fall to the floor. With a flick of his wand, Konrad used the vanishment counter and then wordlessly levitated the candelabra and put it back on her desk. 

“Very well Mr. Albrecht. I often put problems before my students and expect them to solve them with spells they’ve learned recently. I will hold you to a higher standard. The simple answer will be forbidden to you.” She smirked. “Are there any other concerns you have?”

Konrad didn’t really want to say anything, but he found himself respecting her enough to give her a heads up. “Professor Umbridge. You know what she is?” Stone cold silence. She wouldn’t say anything, but she knew. “Good. Then I should inform you, Harry and I… stepped in it with her. Detention, best you hear it from one of us than her.”

She let out a long-suffering sigh “I had a feeling you’d fall in with that lot…” Words said one thing, but the tone of her voice was entirely affectionate, and thus said something different. “Tell me what happened.”

Konrad did. Her face turned beat-red as he relayed the whole incident, but he didn’t think it was directed at him. “There isn’t much I can do, I’m afraid. It’s her classroom and she’s the Minister’s…” She left out the word she wanted to use, and Konrad couldn’t guess which one it would be, there were several he knew across multiple languages. It was simply swallowed. “It’s probably useless to ask that you try to temper their rebellious streak because you have one of your own, and Lord knows I’ve tried. But I think I can trust you to be smart about it. Document everything, if you can.”

She wasn’t saying it, she needed deniability so she couldn’t say it; but it was as close to permission as Konrad thought he could get. He nodded in understanding. “I should probably get to Charms…”

“Yes of course. You’re dismissed.”

* * *

Hermione ambushed Konrad after charms. She’d managed to sneak up on him somehow, and he had no idea how, but there she was, standing in front of him.

“What did you think you were doing, in class earlier?” She asked pointedly. “You just had to go and get Harry riled up about you-know-who!”

“He was doing that on his own, I was trying to draw her attention. Clearly, that failed. Now if you don’t mind, I have somewhere I need to be.” Konrad went right past her. He didn’t have much time, he had to get into his rucksack and do a little arts and crafts project. 

“The great hall is in the other direction.” Hermione informed him, following in his heels. 

“Yes, and that would be good if I were going to eat lunch. But I’m not. There is something I need to make. You can either come with and help, or go and enjoy a pleasant meal. Though honestly I could use some help navigating the stairs, I haven’t gotten used to them yet.” Hermione actually followed.

“What on Earth do you think you need to make?” She asked worriedly. 

“A way to collect evidence.” Konrad replied simply. “Can’t talk in the open. Back in the barracks.” She stopped, probably put off by his word choice, and considered for a moment even though Konrad was not stopping, and then followed. She knew the maze of moving and disjointed staircases like the back of her hand, to the point where she could predict when and how the stairs would move, like she’d just internalized the pattern over the years. It took much less time to get to the door than it otherwise would have. 

He was trying to get to the spiral stairs leading up the bedroom where his rucksack was, but Hermione put a hand on his shoulder. The sudden and unexpected grip from behind caused his body to tense involuntarily and his hand jerked toward his wand, adrenaline spiked and his heartbeat quickened, he could even feel his pupils dilate. Then he remembered it was Hermione and relaxed; coming down off the massive fight or flight response that had been honed to fight.

“Woah!” he could practically feel her hands go up in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry! It’s okay, right? Are you okay?”

Konrad let out a long ragged breath and turned around. “No, not I am not; but you have nothing to apologize for. I need a smoke and to get to work. Care to join me?”

She gave him a very concerned look and nodded. “Can you talk about what you’re doing? Do you need to talk about something else?”

“Let me get my stuff and I’ll explain.”

* * *

The afternoon air was agreeable to him as he used an actual zippo to light up the cancer stick. It calmed the nerves, Gott sei Dank, he would need his hands steady to do what he needed to do. He opened up his rucksack and pointed his wand inside. “Accio Electronik-kit’. And out flew a tacklebox, like one would use for fishing. He held the cigarette between his lips so both hands were free as he opened it up and pulled out the contents, while Hermione stood upwind. Wires, some breadboards, resistors and capacitors of various kinds. He fished around until he found what he was looking for: a box the size of a sugar cube with a thick copper wire sticking out of it; and a somewhat larger box with dials and liquid crystal display in megahertz and a speaker. 

Hermione’s eyes lit up when she understood what he was doing. “You’re bugging Umbridge’s office, aren’t you? And you just… keep everything you need to do that on you at all times?” 

“Seid Bereit.” Konrad said in a matter of fact tone. “But not everything. I can listen all day, but I have no way of recording the surveillance take. Any ideas?”

“Well for starters, if those are purely electronic, they’re not going to work. The radio itself probably will, but Hogwarts is so suffused with magic it messes with anything more complex than an incandescent bulb. It just won’t get power.”

“Verdammt.” Konrad cursed. “So I’ll have to figure out a workaround. Power them magically. Anything else?”

Hermione paused and thought, rather visibly thinking hard. Konrad could almost hear the gears turning in her head as her forehead and eyebrows scrunched together. Then the idea came to her and there might as well have been a lightbulb turn on over her head. “The record player! Can you use geomancy?”

“A little, I can use runes to set up a sympathy and contagion link and du bist eine wundervolle Person und wenn ich nicht schwul wäre, würde ich dich küssen!”

“What?”

Konrad wasn’t ready to open that door just yet. “Uh, you’re awesome, and a magnificently clever enabler of my schemes! Okay, we have a plan. Runes and geomancy solve both problems. I can use one of the school’s ley-lines to power the bug and receiver, as well as link the receiver to the record player. Think you can make it record rather than playback?”

“I think so.” She thought for a second, and nodded. “Yes. Yes I can.” 

They got to work. Hermione used a duplication transfiguration to make a copy of their record player. A few relatively simple transfigurations later, and it would cut onto wax rather than play from vinyl. Konrad finished the smoke and got to work inscribing runes onto some conjured copper sheets that would allow him to link the speaker from the receiver to the recorder Hermione was building. 

“Okay, now we need the disks. Uh, I don’t suppose there are some vinyl records no one listens to or that are just bad?” Konrad asked. He didn’t want to destroy someone’s prized Beatles album or something.

Hermione got a wicked grin on her face. “I think we can manage.” She practically scampered to the shelf that held all the records and pulled a few off the shelves. “The Twins will miss them, but the rest of us won’t.” 

Konrad looked at them. “David Hasseloff… Ja, fuck die Westdeutschen and their strange obsession.” With flick of his wand and the incantation “Transmutare durum cera” and subsequently “Litura” each one of them became a hard wax that could be cut by a record player’s fine needle.

“Now we just have to place the receiver. What’s the range on that bug?” Hermione asked. “In fact, where did you even get a covert listening device?”

“Only about three hundred meters.” Konrad replied, then shrugged. “It was hidden behind the bookshelf in the living room. When the wall fell, I kept it. Duplicated it a few times just to be sure.”

She stared at him. “That you’re so casual about mass surveillance like that is, I will admit, somewhat disturbing.”

Konrad shrugged “You brits have CCTV cameras everywhere, and then there’s whatever domestic and allied-foreign surveillance and information sharing NATO gets up to.” It wasn’t an accusation. Just a statement of fact. 

Hermione looked like she wanted to argue the point and put a finger up before she stopped herself. “Point. Anyway, I think I know where to put the receiver. Her office is just above the classroom, so the library should be in range.”

“Wunderbar.” 

* * *

For Konrad, the rest of the day passed as a blur. He had the bug in his pocket the whole day, separated from the magical pseudobattery of course, but he wasn’t exactly looking forward to whatever it was Umbridge had in store. It could just be petty, or it could be worse, and the uncertainty was killing him. He just had to trust Hermione to know what she was doing, hanging out in the library with a radio receiver enchanted with magic runes. 

His hands were shaking when he got to Umbridge’s office. He’d grabbed a quick smoke in a courtyard nook and erased the smell with a cleaning charm, so that wasn’t it. It was sheer terror. The last time… In his mind’s gaze, for a split second, Harry’s face turned into another; another boy a bit older than he was, clean shaven and scared, strapped to a chair and bruised, his sun blonde hair caked in blood. Konrad shook his head, trying to think of something else. Anything else. He finally settled on thoughts of kittens. Nice fluffy kittens, playing with balls of yarn. 

When Harry settled in beside him, he felt a bit better. Better enough that he was able to get the battery just inside the little socket it fit into, but not far in enough to make contact with the leads and activate it. 

“You ready for this?” Harry asked. “You’re shaking.”

“I know. And… sort of. Not really. I’ll live.” He hoped. Either way, it was best to just get whatever it was over with. Konrad knocked on the door and steeled himself. When the door opened, Professor Umbridge grinned at them and let them inside. She’d just made herself some tea, and heaped sugar into it. The room itself was an absolute saccharine nightmare. It was pink. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Absolutely everything. Kittens were ruined for Konrad, forever. Covering every available space on the walls there were decorative plates with animated meowing cats on them. They walked from plate to plate, playing with each other, grooming themselves, meowing for attention that they’d never receive because they only occupied two spatial dimensions. 

She sat down, and motioned to two desks on opposite sides of the room. Each one had paper, an hourglass, and a stern looking still-picture of Minister Fudge facing the chairs. They both sat down. Konrad somehow managed to stop the shakes when actually in the face of the enemy. 

“You’re going to be doing some lines for me today.” By reflex, both of them reached into their pockets for their quills and she stopped them. “No not with your quills. You’ll be using some special ones of mine.” She flicked her wand without bothering to get up, and two quills floated over to settle down on the pink placemats. 

Konrad looked around to see if there was any ink in a drawer or something, finding nothing he had to ask the question. “Is there ink, Professor?”

“You won’t be needing it. Just write ‘I must not tell lies’ until the message sinks in.” Konrad didn’t like the sound of that, but he started writing. Immediately, his left hand began to sting, like someone was writing on the back of his hand with the tip of a knife, not cutting but scratching, in time with his own pen strokes, which were writing in red ink. Konrad could put two and two together, the quill was using his blood as ink, it had to be. With each line, it got worse. Konrad resolved not to show pain, so he kept going, but Harry didn’t have experience going for him and started wincing. 

Konrad glanced up and saw Professor Umbridge with her back turned and her back arched slightly. She was breathing far too heavily and sighing on the exhale, and that’s when Konrad realized to his horror that she wasn’t just doing this as a means to an end. It was an end to itself. A few minutes later, Harry stopped and looked at his hand. Konrad did the same and saw the words ‘I must not tell lies’ carved into the flesh on the back of his hand. 

Professor Umbridge, no longer hearing either of their suffering, turned around and asked a question of Harry after walking to the front of his desk and looming over him. Konrad took the opportunity to carefully and quietly unwrap an adhesive putty he’d conjured earlier in the day and press it into the underside of the writing desk; then fold the bug - microphone element out - into it. It would fix and harden on exposure to air, pressed into the wood grain. 

“Yes? Is something wrong, Mr. Potter?” While Konrad stared at the back of her head, wishing he could unceremoniously put a bullet into the back of it, Harry stood up straight and looked her straight in the eye. 

“No. Nothing.” He replied. 

“That’s right. Because you know, deep down, that you deserve to be punished. Don’t you Mr. Potter?” She turned around to face Konrad and he didn’t flinch. He stared right into her dark eyes that he imagined had no soul behind them. “And so do you, Mr. Albrecht. You’re a foreigner. A guest here, at our sufferance. Someone who should know their place and not indulge in their… muggle bolshevik deviance.” He was surprised she was even aware of that word, but she may have done some research. Still, Konrad didn’t say anything. He just kept writing. 

What she did do was turn over the hourglass on Harry’s desk. “Keep writing until the hour is up. Then you are dismissed.”

By the time the hour was up, Harry was whimpering and crying with each pen stroke and Konrad was grunting and wincing under the pain, keeping himself centered with controlled breaths. In and out, he focused on that to keep his mind off the agony in his hand, he was even biting his own tongue just to deny Umbridge the satisfaction of hearing him suffer. 

The very second the sand finished running from the top of the glass to the bottom, Konrad got up. He waited at the door for Harry and they hurried out. Completely wordlessly. Konrad didn’t waste any time just in case the wounds would heal abnormally quickly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a camera about the size of a cigarette pack that was covered in hastily scrawled magic runes.

“Harry, your hand?” The intention was clear enough and Harry held out his hand. Konrad depressed the button and took a series of highly detailed photos of each of their hands. Not a moment too soon, because they were already starting to scab over. 

“You… you knew?” Harry asked in a stammer.

“I suspected.” Konrad told him. “We can’t talk here Harry. Let’s get home, we’ll talk there.”

* * *

Hermione and Ron met them on the balcony of the Gryffindor boys dormitory tower. The wax-recorder was still going, they couldn’t tell what was being said because it was recording, but it was getting toward the center of its recording range. 

Hermione’s cheeks were red and her face was still wet. She’d heard everything and had obviously been crying. The moment she saw them she ran up and threw her arms around Harry, who was a bit taken aback at first but hugged her back. 

“Okay, it’s okay. I’m okay, Hermione.” He said and wormed his way out of the hug. “What’s going on? Konrad what did you do, why the secrecy?”

Konrad took a respectful distance downwind and lit up a cigarette. Well-earned as far as he was concerned. He answered on the exhale. “I bugged that sadistic Fotze’s office, that’s what I did.” He didn’t actually know the word in english so he improvised. “Oder, Hermione and I did.” He pointed toward the wax recorder. “That was her idea, and her baby; among other things like figuring out how to power electronics. We have everything documented. Hermione, where did you put the receiver?”

“It’s under one of the stacks in the history section. No one will go there and find it.”

“Good work.” Konrad physically saluted her. Then he pulled out his wand and quickly conjured four chairs, one for each of them, in a trapezoid with the far corner downwind and a bit distant from the other three. Another flick of his wand “Accio schnaps zuerst”. He had his cigarette trapped between his lips leaving a hand free, and the bottle of schnapps he kept in his rucksack, one of several numbered ones, flew around the corner and into his outstretched hand. He sat in the downwind chair after turning it around to straddle it with the back facing them. 

The other three sat down, and Ron openly stared at the distilled liquor Konrad evidently had squirreled away along with radio receivers and room bugs. 

“Am I the only person who doesn’t have a sodding clue what’s goin’ on?” Ron asked. “Because you two went to detention, now Hermione is crying and Harry looks like… I don’t know what Harry looks like, but your hands are shaking and you seem like you handle yourself well under pressure.”

Harry took his wand out of his own pocket and with a flick illuminated it to show him his hand. “That’s what happened.”

Hermione had heard it happen, clearly didn’t want to look, but did anyway. Ron didn’t have a clue so he looked. Konrad looked at his own hand. It had formed scars with those words etched into his flesh. 

“You could tell Dumbledore?” Hermione suggested but she knew what the answer would be.

“No. He has enough on his mind, and you saw how he just let her walk all over him last night? He didn’t have a say in her hiring, he can’t sack her either. Besides I don’t want to give her the satisfaction.” Harry replied.

“Bloody hell Harry, the woman’s torturing you. Both of you. If the parents found out they’d” Harry cut him off. 

“Well if you haven’t noticed I don’t have any of those, and Konrad isn’t just an immigrant. His parents are muggles; the Ministry won’t even let them in the door to complain.”

“You’ve got to tell someone Harry.” Ron replied. 

“Who am I going to tell, Ron? The Ministry? They tried to railroad me out of here. This isn’t a simple matter of filing a complaint. Whatever this is, it isn’t simple. None of you can possibly understand.”

“I do, Harry.” Konrad blurted out, and Harry wheeled his head around and they locked eyes. In Harry’s eyes he saw the same one-kilometer stare he saw whenever he looked in the mirror, and he saw Harry recognize it too. When he spoke, it might as well have been a command as much as a question. Konrad wanted to tell him, needed to.

“What happened?” 

“How much do you want? It is a bit of a story.” The wind picked up and Konrad noticed he’d actually zoned out and his cigarette was uncomfortably close to the filter. He pulled out a second and lit it from the ember of the first. 

Harry paused for just long enough to consider the question before replying. “What happened after the wall fell Konrad?”

“After muggle Germany reunified,” It poured out of him like water from a broken dam “we thought the _Volshebnik Sovetskoy Sotsialisticheskoy Respubliki_ had our backs, so we didn’t pay it much attention. But they had their own problems that gave MACUSA and the Zaubererparlament an opening.” He drank from the bottle of schnapps and took a drag from his second cigarette before continuing, speaking while exhaling. “At the end of my fifth year, the fight was over almost as soon as it started, they forced our Zaubererarbeiterrat to capitulate inside three days.”

“They… they conquered you? But the Prophet said you’d just acceded to unification alongside the muggles...” That was Hermione; she wasn’t calling him a liar, but then she paused. “But then again they do keep Rita Skeeter on staff…”

“They presented it as a peaceful annexation in their propaganda afterward, but it _wasn’t_.” Konrad insisted. “Look, if I start talking about the reasons I’ll be here all night. Suffice to say, the Parallel World War and the Cold War were layered things, with the end result being that our Wizard government in East Germany was better than it’s muggle counterpart, and the West German one was worse.”

“What was the conflict? That stuff about parasitic rich families you were telling me last night?” Ron asked. 

“Partly, but the biggest thing was our desire to eventually reveal ourselves to the muggles and use magic to help them achieve a communist utopia.” Konrad replied. 

“Oh! And Americans really would not go for that!” Ron realized like lightning just hit him in the head. “I hear they obliviate the parents of muggleborns.”

“They do.” Konrad confirmed, taking a drag from the cigarette while he did so. “The West German wizards had other grudges, from the Russian Revolution and the Parallel War, but that’s even more complex. Suffice to say, they don’t like communists and the feeling is mutual. There wasn’t any of that brotherly love like you see with the muggles.”

“What happened after that, in the schools?” Harry asked. “I get the feeling that’s where things got really bad…”

“In my sixth year they appointed an overseer, Herr Johann Schneider, to _Liberate_ us.” Konrad took another drag and exhaled while saying that, using air quotes with his free hand. “New classes became mandatory for all students. Kapitalismusstudien, those of us who argued got _detention_.” And through his tone, it was clear to the others that Umbridge and Schneider might want to compare notes. “New students were transferred in from the West, seventh years all of them. They were supposed to serve as positive role-models, but they also served as informants and enforcers.”

It was at that point that Konrad actually opened up the bottle of schnapps and took a swig from it. A fairly substantial one. It was a Obstler, distilled from a cherry brandy, rather than grain alcohol with syrup. 

“We organized like good communists and resisted, of course. Walked out of classes, staged sit-ins, engaged in cacany, spread misinformation, spied. It escalated. Once students started physically and magically resisting the abuse… that was when they sent in the American Secret Police. Black-cloak unit out of Latin-America I think; we just called them die Faust-Gesellschaft because they’d sold their souls to the devil. They arrested Schulleiter Köhler on their first day, called an assembly, and executed her with a killing-curse in front of us just to prove they could get away with _anything_.”

“And after that?” Harry asked. “What did you do?” He was visibly horrified. “Did you fight back?”

“For a while, even after I left the school” Konrad confessed. “But in the end, they had the country, and I was forced to flee with my parents. I… I had a friend, Marius. He...” He figured they could guess the rest and he didn’t have it in him to describe that.

“So…” Ron’s internal gearbox was whirling “What should we do?”

“I don’t know.” Konrad answered with a shrug. “I want to fight, but I did that once. Failed.” He stood up and paced over to Harry, Ron, and Hermione; offering Harry the bottle. Harry took it, sniffed, then took a mouthful. He grimaced and passed the bottle to Ron who did the same thing. Hermione refused. 

“She’s the responsible one.” Ron noted. 

She rolled her eyes. “Just don’t drink yourself into a stupor.” She shot eyes at Konrad “And don’t you dare offer them those foul cancer-sticks!”

Ron passed the bottle back to Konrad and he took another swig before magically whisking it back to his rucksack “That was social bonding for idiots.” He finished off his cigarette and properly disposed of it “This is slowly committing suicide. Completely different.” Hermione somehow managed to scoff and roll her eyes even deeper into their sockets.

“Could you two give us a moment?” Harry asked the other two. Ron and Hermione looked at eachother, concerned, but they did what they were asked to do and walked inside. “Thanks. I don’t know why that helped, but it did. Ron and Hermione, they love me and they try, but they don’t… they haven’t…”

“Ja. I know.” Konrad squeezed his shoulder “You’ve been through a lot together, but at the end of the day you faced the worst of it on your own. I know you’ve probably had your ups and downs, but keep in mind that when push came to shove they’ve been there.” Watching their relationship reminded Konrad so much of him and Marius it hurt. He tried to banish that thought from his head though, because the mix of really good memories combined with the horror it became was just too much. 

“Yeah they have been, and I don’t want to push them away, but I don’t know if I can put them through...”

“More?” Konrad asked, knowing the answer.

“Yeah.” 

“Harry, I understand what you’re going through and am always willing to talk, but I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t come to me for life-advice. Let’s be honest, I’m pretty screwed up. You have adults you trust?” Konrad asked. “Given the last war, you’re bound to know someone, ja?”

“A few. Ron’s parents, but they treat me like their own son and try to shelter me. Bit late for that. There’s padfoot, uh, Sirius Black. My Godfather.”

“The one who was framed for murdering your parents?” Hermione talked fast and was very thorough. “Ja. Talk to him. And go for a walk in the The Nature when you get a chance It will help center you. But look at me Harry?” Harry did. For some reason, Konrad was feeling like an older brother already. He decided to roll with it.

“The situation you’re in is different from the one I was in. They were trying to destroy our culture. Here, they’re just trying to destroy _you_. I don’t know how to stop them but whatever you decide to do, I’ll back you. Just don’t let them break you. We’ll know more once I’ve given Professor McGonagall the surveillance take, okay? We need to see if the staff will intervene.”

Harry nodded. “Okay.”

* * *

The next morning, before class, Konrad had an appointment and left the Great Hall earlier than usual from breakfast. As he left and headed toward Professor McGonagall’s office, he heard footsteps pitter-pattering behind him. Konrad turned, and saw the anti-Thatcher kid trailing behind him. He was small, even for his age, with sandy blonde hair and teeth that were a bit large for his skull. 

“Hey.” The anti-Thatcher kid said, and Konrad stopped. 

“Ja? What can I do for you?” He’d left a copy of The Manifesto on the little fourth-year’s bed the first night, and was hoping to have a talk. Still, it could have come at a better time.

“Um… don’t be mad but… why did you leave this on my bed? I read it, because I read everything, but… if we get rid of Private Property, are people going to come take my camera? How does that work?” 

Konrad tilted his head. “Why would I get mad at you for asking an honest question?” Konrad asked. “I left it there because you expressed a hatred for the Iron Lady and thought you might appreciate some light reading. As for the camera, no. No one would take it from you. We communists make a distinction between personal property, and private property. Personal property is just your stuff; books, toothbrushes, cameras. Private property is the Means of Production; the places where cameras, toothbrushes, and books are made.”

The kid nodded “Oh! But what if I use my camera to make money?” He asked. It was a good question. 

“Well,” Konrad answered “if it is just your camera and you are working as a freelance photographer? No problem. It’s yours. If you have a bunch of cameras you hire other people to use, then those cameras are the Means of Production.”

“That makes sense, okay, thank you for clarifying. I want to be a photographer for one of the newspapers when I grow up so… How would that even work under communism?”

Konrad grinned “The photographers, editors, and journalists would own and control the business collectively; or the community as a whole would, depending on your exact set up. No CEO, no shareholders to please. You could just focus on being good journalists.”

The kid smiled. “I think I like that.” He held out his hand “Colin, Colin Creevy!”

“A pleasure.” Konrad shook his hand. “Konrad Albrecht.”

* * *

  
  


Konrad knocked on Professor McGonagall’s office door. He’d transmuted the wax recording into vinyl and held the original - he’d made a copy - in a conjured paper case. She answered, and still looked half asleep holding a mug of tea that smelled like Earl Grey. “What is it Mr. Albrecht?” She asked; he handed her the record. 

“I recorded last night’s detention. You’ll want to hear this, professor.” He paused and reconsidered. “Actually I think you don’t want to hear it, but you have to.” Konrad replied. She gave him a quizzical look 

“How did you do that? All the professors' offices are warded against magical means of listening and viewing by students. To avoid cheating on exams!”

“I didn’t use listening or watching spells.” Konrad gave her a cheeky grin. “Muggle surveillance technology using runework to bypass the problems with electricity. A microphone attached to a radio. I would ask that should you discuss what you hear with Professor Umbridge, that you not reveal you have recordings.”

She at least had the sense to know what radios and microphones were. “Of course, one of you tattling to your Head of House if she did something wrong is expected and normal. Bugging her office with muggle artefacts is _certainly not_. She’d never even consider it.” Professor McGonagall paused, then winked. “Thank you.”

“Naturlich. Anyway, I have to get to her class and try to avoid a recurrence. Oh, I have something else for you.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved the photos, with a few more documenting how quickly they faded. The time was written on the back of each one. “I might have stayed up late developing the negatives.” She took them from his outstretched hand and blanched momentarily, then turned a bright shade of red.

“It seems I shall be creating a dossier for a formal inquiry then.” Barely controlling rage. “But shall not reveal that I have them until I drop them in someone’s lap.”

“Ausgezeichnet. Danke, Professor McGonagall. I’ll see you in Transfiguration.”

* * *

Harry was late for lunch, even later than Konrad was with his own smoke break, which caused Konrad some concern. But when he came in and awkwardly stood next to Ron and Hermione - who was in the middle of pestering Ron for over-eating - he looked a lot better than he had last night. Konrad looked down at his shoes and saw some mud caked on them. 

“I see you went for a walk in The Nature, feel better?” Konrad asked. 

“I do, yes. I think I even made a few new friends. I have an idea, is it alright if we all go somewhere and talk?” He asked.

Hermione and Ron were about to respond when there was a commotion from the corridor outside the Great Hall. 

“Pardon me, Professor, but what exactly are you insinuating?” It was Umbridge’s voice, unmistakably, and she was none-too-pleased. The response carried in a high scottish brogue that was equally unmistakable, and concealed beneath formality was pure rage.

 _‘Nun, jemand hat sich die Aufnahmen angehört…’_ Konrad thought, as he got up along with everyone else to go watch the fireworks. He just hoped it was literal because he was pretty sure Professor McGonagall could turn Umbridge into a greasy smear on the walls that Filtch would spend weeks cleaning up. 

“I am merely requesting that when it comes to my students, you conform to the prescribed disciplinary practices!”

“So silly of me, but it sounds as if you’re questioning my authority in my own classroom.” The affront might as well have been a physical thing from Umbridge. “Minerva.” And the power-play.

Professor McGonagall stepped up to the same level on the stairs and loomed over Umbridge, leaning forward ever so slightly backing her up against a pillar. “Not at all, _Delores_. Merely your medieval methods!”

Umbridge held her ground, it was almost admirable, and scoffed. “I… am sorry, dear.” It was a very British rebuke. “But to question my practices is to question the Ministry, and by extension the Minister himself!” McGonagall looked at her dumbstruck, like she was completely insane and living in some sort of alternative fact regime, and was at a complete loss for words. “I am a tolerant woman, but the one thing I will not stand for is disloyalty.” She all but accused Professor McGonagall of treason, and her position on the Wizengamot could make it stick; and because Professor McGonagall had some sense of self-preservation, she backed down. Umbridge stepped up to a higher step. “Things at Hogwarts are far worse than I feared!” She proclaimed. “Cornelius will want to take immediate action!”

 _‘Sheiße.’_ Konrad thought, and his blood ran cold. He was hoping that would be the end of it. That professor McGonagall would have the combination of clout and sheer nerve to put Umbridge in her place, but that display of complete support from the Ministry had checked her. He must have zoned out, because when Harry touched him on the shoulder everyone else was gone and he was staring at the wall. He could hear the gossip happening from inside the Great Hall, but he didn’t have an appetite anymore. 

“You okay?” Harry asked. 

“Nein. I was hoping that would go differently. If you have an idea for how to proceed, we should discuss it this evening. I suspect there will be some changes coming in the next few days, we should be ready for them.”

“Not yet, but we should talk anyway.” Harry replied.

“Harry, I haven’t asked you… why do you keep coming back here? People have been trying to kill you since your first quidditch match. Why not stay home and hire a private tutor, or something, or go to Beauxbatons or something?”

Harry shrugged. “Because home is worse, and I have people I care about here.” He replied simply. “If I weren’t here, all the horrible things would still happen, but I wouldn’t be here to stop it, and I’d be on my own when things follow me home.”

“I suppose that’s fair, and the danger does seem to follow you home…” Konrad replied. 

* * *

Konrad needed to decompress, so passed through the halls and down a staircase into the main courtyard. People were milling about, but there was a little nook behind some pillars that he’d privately designated his smoking area. It wasn’t until after he’d lit up that he noticed the three sets of footfalls behind him on the other side of the pillars. He privately cursed himself for not spotting the tail, then realized that he expected himself to notice tails. 

“Du bist eine vermaßelte Person, Konrad.” he muttered to himself. Still, he didn’t want to get boxed in, so he stepped around the pillar to face whoever it was that had followed him. None other than the blonde pinch-faced bourgeois trash that was Draco Malfoy, flanked by two... friends? Goons? They looked to Konrad like goons. One was built like an adipose refrigerator, and the other one looked like he ate right and lifted, but had a flat face and a bit of an underbite. 

“Ah, hallo Herr Malfoy, I was wondering when you’d deign to pay me a visit! And you even brought your Schergen! I am honored by your arrival. ” Konrad sneered at them. 

“Well well well, if it isn’t the German deviant! Comrade Konrad Albrecht” That posh accent grated on Konrad so much, he did make sure his wand was ready to hand, and switched his cigarette to his left hand. “I was wondering where you skulked off to, imagine my surprise to find you out here all by yourself, without Potter and his idiot friends to protect you. I remember that little speech you gave, Mudblood, or is it Blood-traitor? There’s no telling with you foreigners.”

“Mudblood, danke. Better that than an inbred Trottel. Family trees are supposed to have branches, you know; how many sister-cousins do you have? I confess to being curious about your future marriage prospects.” Konrad casually took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled, using that action to cover for the fact that he was drawing his wand and concealing it behind his back. By this point, there were other witnesses. A crowd of mostly-Hufflepuff students if the robe color was any indication. Konrad couldn’t help but notice Malfoy’s prefect badge. He had to be careful, he couldn’t afford to caste the first spell. Then he spotted Colin Creevy, precious mousy little Colin Creevy with his camera. 

Malfoy nodded his head in both directions, and with the ease of long practice the two goons fanned out along Konrad’s flanks. “I should teach you a lesson Mudblood…”

“Well, I am so very fond of lessons Herr Malfoy, and I would love to see a demonstration of what the famed Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry teaches its students.” He turned his head slightly. “Mr. Creevy, make sure to thoroughly document the lesson. Pay special attention to who starts it and who finishes.” Not that he intended to hurt them; Konrad certainly wanted to and could, but he was aware that if he actually caused injury, that would not go over well. Konrad took a final drag and extinguished his cigarette as if to punctuate the statement, whisking the remains and evidence away into some nook or another inside his robe by sleight of hand. He also tapped himself with a silent cleaning spell. 

“You got it!” Colin called back helpfully, raising his camera to his eyes, finger on the trigger. The bulb flashed, capturing the layout. Konrad, surrounded on three sides, in what he could only imagine was a short clip of magical video. Malfoy looked like was about to back down, but his minion, the bull elephant seal, cast the first spell. 

He thrust his wand forward and shouted an incantation. “Flipendo!”, the spell was intended to simply knock Konrad over, and he countered it by swinging his wand around that side of his body and wordlessly using a shield charm, which blocked the knockback jinx completely. He then recast the same spell but slightly differently to buy himself some time.

“Protego duo!” Followed by pointing his wand at the corpulent wizard “Petrificus totalus!” spitting out the binding hex as fast as he could. It worked, freezing him in place and unable to act. The shield charm lit up in two separate flashes of blue light, which caused it to collapse. He ducked behind the pillar which absorbed a third spell cast from Malfoy. He paused there for just a second, then quickly poked his head out from the pillar on the right side. It was a feint, they targeted where he was and in the time it took them to orient themselves and release their spells, he was throwing his wand out from the other side, already speaking the incantation.

“Levicorpus!” He hit the other goon with it, and he floated into the air; then Konrad stepped out from behind the pillar fully, using a wordless shield charm to protect himself from Malfoy’s Orbis jinx.

“Expelliarmus!” Konrad hid the goon with the disarming charm, not only removing his wand, but sending him tumbling through the air. 

Malfoy, to his credit, dispelled the levitation jinx, but not especially gently. His goon fell to the ground with an unceremonious thud and a groan as the air was forced out of his lungs. By the time Malfoy looked back, Konrad was in a dueling stance with his wand at a guard position. 

“Would you like to try your luck alone, Herr Malfoy? Or would you prefer to run away and scheme revenge like your father?” A comment that elicited an “Oooooooh” from the crowd of other students.

“My father-” Malfoy tried to reply, but Konrad cut him off, imitating his own accent, poorly, to do it.

“should have been executed.”

Which was when things got interesting. Malfoy became red in the face and truly angry then, he stopped using the sorts of spells that would merely inconvenience that were his go-to bullying spells, but could actually cause harm. The finger-removing jinx, stinging jinx, and several blasts of energy were unleashed from Malfoy’s wand and Konrad was forced onto the backfoot casting shield charms as fast as he could. 

The whole time Colin kept banging away on the camera shutter, capturing the entire exchange from start to finish. 

The difference between Konrad and Malfoy though was that Konrad was clear-headed rather than in a rage, and Draco Malfoy was bound to either make a mistake or tire eventually. Konrad kept his want movements minimalist, while Draco was using large sweeping motions that were still within the formulae for the spells he was using. Until one wasn’t. He screwed up on a Oppugno jinx he’d intended to use to pelt Konrad with rocks, and gave Konrad an opening. 

“Expelliarmus!” The quick simple disarming charm took Malfoy’s wand away, which gave him the opening for another spell “Accio”, which, given that Malfoy’s wand was no longer under his control, summoned it straight into Konrad’s hand. The enraged Draco then charged him, only for Professor McGonagall’s voice to ring out across the courtyard. 

“Petrificus totalus!” freezing Draco in place not more than three meters away from his petrified associate. “Mr. Albrecht, explain yourself!”

Konrad stood at attention, and dropped Malfoy’s wand, putting his own back in the holster at his side. “Professor McGonagall, these three attempted to bully me, a verbal sparring match escalated into a three-on-one fight, which I did not start, nor did I actually injure or attempt to injure them.”

“Professor, he’s right. Crabbe cast the first spell, I got it all on film!” Colin Creevy helpfully volunteered. There were warring feelings in Professor McGonagall, they were written all over her face. A combination of anger and a certain pride if Konrad had any sense of such things. 

“I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Creevy. You’ve always been trustworthy and level-headed.” She replied after a long moment. Then she made her pronouncements. “Ten points shall be deducted from both Slytherin and Gryffindor house for each participant in this stupidity.” which netted Gryffindor ten fewer points, and Slytherin thirty. “And ten points shall be awarded to Gryffindor House for Mr. Creevy’s documentarian spirit. No detention shall be issued. You are all dismissed!” Then she remembered, and dispelled the petrification curses on Malfoy and Crabbe. 

* * *

Later on, in the evening, once homework was done and everyone else had gone to bed, Harry gathered them around the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room. The ambient temperature was chilly, because there was no way to insulate a castle, but the fireplace created a warm patch that made curling up in blankets absolute perfection. The fire was also the only light-source in the room, casting shadows and giving the feeling of a comfortable welcoming space. Ron, Hermione and Harry were curled up together on a larger couch - Ron on Harry’s right, with Hermione on his left - while Konrad was on a big easy chair that he practically melted into. All it needed was a friendly dog going around demanding ear-scratches.

“Konrad already knows this, but… Ron, you know how I said I was fine the other night?” Ron nodded.

“Screamed it more like… lady doth protest too much if you ask me.” Hermione gave him a look. “Sorry Harry.” He apologized quickly, though it wasn’t needed. Harry chuckled weakly. 

“No, it’s alright, you’re not wrong. I haven’t been okay since Cedric died. I’ve been having nightmares, then the dementors following me home, the hearing. It’s just been too much. When Cedric and I were… in that maze, we got through it together, and decided we would both grab it and end everything with a tie. Both claim it, you know? When we got transported, his first question was whether I was okay. When Peter Pettigrew and Voldemort’s… Homunculus came out of the mausoleum, he tried to defend me. He was a good, decent person, and you know what Voldemort said?” The question was rhetorical and he didn’t wait for an answer. “ _Kill the spare_ … like he was nothing.”

“Harry I’m so sorry.” Hermione said very softly and leaned on Harry’s shoulder.

“Me too Mate, I knew something was wrong I just… I guess I still don’t know how to handle it.”

“I don’t either.” Harry said. “But I talked to Luna Lovegood today, and she reminded me that, well, I don’t have to deal with this alone. She’s not as crazy as people think, like the Thestrels she’s just weird and misunderstood. She watched her mother die in front of her when she was nine.”

“It’s why we can see them.” Konrad added. “We’ve seen someone die.”

“Yeah, she told me that too.” Harry confirmed. “Speaking of which her shoes keep going missing. She thinks it’s Nargles but I’m pretty sure people are just taking them.”

“Well I think we can do something about that…” Konrad winked at Harry, even as the gears in his own head were turning. Hermione gave him a look.

“I heard about your row with Malfoy today, by the way. Well-done execution, but you shouldn’t do things like that…” She had to say that, she was one of the house Prefects.

“I do a lot of things I probably shouldn’t, but why not?” Konrad asked. “Someone needs to, he’s a pinch-faced little scheißkopf who’s been using his social class as a shield to bully people for years. But I wasn’t thinking in those terms… just… we should make it a point to combat bullying.”

“How?” Ron asked. “It’s not like we haven’t stood up to Malfoy and everyone else before.” Konrad grinned at that.

“True, but you’ve done it as individuals. It isn’t just the three of you who are strong-” Harry interrupted him. 

“You can include yourself in there too, if you want.” Konrad felt… surprisingly happy about that and grinned. 

“Danke…that...means a lot to me.” He actually had to compose himself a bit before he continued. “So _we_ outnumber the bullies considerably, when you consider everyone they bully. They just pick on everyone as individuals. We have to respond to it collectively. You might say we have to create a mass line.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we become a marxist political party?” Hermione asked. 

Konrad put up his hands in a defensive posture. “No no, not yet at least.” He winked. “Simply that the organization tactics used in them work.”

“What are you two egg-heads going on about?” Ron asked. Harry chuckled.

* * *

The next morning there was a plaque posted up on the wall just inside the main doors. Educational Decree #23, appointing Umbridge as High Inquisitor, which evidently gave her the authority to investigate and even fire the staff, and to administer punishments to students as she saw fit. Konrad had expected something along those lines. What he hadn’t expected was for her to measure Professor Flitwick. Other educational decrees specified bans against music, public affection, or uniform variation. 

What she didn’t stop or even know about was the meeting Hermione called that involved the prefects from Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff houses a few weeks later - it was the soonest that the schedules could be made to fit. Ernest Macmillan and Hannah Abbot from Hufflepuff House, Anthony Goldstein and Padma Patil from Ravenclaw house, herself, and Ron. Which surprised Konrad because he didn’t even realize Ron was a prefect. 

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem, and we’ve had it for years.” Hermione started. “Slytherin prefects abusing their power and their students getting away with bullying anyone they please. We need to put a stop to it.”

Ernest spoke up “We try, Hermione, but we can’t be everywhere at once. Draco Malfoy in particular. If he doesn’t get his way he starts rumor campaigns to destroy someone’s reputation.” He looked about sheepish about that and mutter an apology to Harry for having fallen into one himself. 

“Obviously Ms. Granger has a plan for that Ernest, or she wouldn’t have called this meeting.” Padma replied with a slight eye-roll. “It’s even worse now, between everything going on and revising for our OWLS.” Everyone nodded at that, and Ernest muttered something about studying for nine hours a day. Everyone turned to stare at him a little bit, and noticed the bags under his eyes. 

“If you’re studying for nine hours a day Ernest, you won’t actually learn anything you’ll just burn out.” Anthony told him. “Meet me after, I can give you some tips, study smarter not harder.” 

“We’re getting off topic…” Hermione said to bring them back. “We don’t have to be everywhere at once, but we’re all in a leadership position in our respective houses, we should use that. It’s not just the Slytherins, someone has been taking Luna Lovegood’s shoes…” Given she was in Ravenclaw House she gave the Ravenclaw Prefects the eyes. They both withered.

“Uh… yeah. I suppose change needs to start at home, doesn’t it?” Anthony agreed. “We can start there.”

“No problems like that in Hufflepuff House.” Hannah Abbot declared with a certain amount of finality. “But change starting at home doesn’t really fix the Slytherin problem. You and your friends catch a lot of Draco Malfoy, but the Slytherin underclassmen take a shine to preying on my kids. I would like to figure out a way of dealing with that.”

Konrad and Harry had been sitting in the back, waiting. “Harry and Konrad have some ideas about how to do that.”

“Wait, isn’t that the guy who thrashed Malfoy?” Anthony asked. 

“Ja. I don’t like fascists. In fact, I really hate fascists.” Konrad replied. “You understand, ja?”

“Absolutely. My grandparents fought Grindelwald and I lost muggle family on the Eastern Front. Learned to count from my maternal grandmother’s Auschwitz tattoo. What did you have in mind?”

“What’s Auschwitz, and why do people have tattoos of it?” Ernest asked.

“Nobody say a word.” Anthony said, facepalming “I swear to G-d.” he even swallowed the o successfully. “We’ll talk later Ernest. Don’t eat lunch.”

“I don’t like the sound of that, but okay.” Ernest agreed, and Konrad just blinked. He’d been to Auschwitz, he’d seen the pile of shoes and wept; the idea that someone wouldn’t even know that something really bad happened there because the education system didn’t give two shits happened to muggles in eastern Europe just boggled his mind. 

“What do you want us to do exactly?” Padma asked, pulling out a notepad and a quill. She was going to prepare a list. Konrad took out his wand and started drawing in the air in red light. The first thing was a large circle. 

“This is the base. The people you want to help, consisting of the entire student body.” He drew another circle inside that. “These are sympathizers who quietly like what you’re doing, but keep their heads down.” A third even smaller circle. “Supporters who sometimes get involved.” Lastly two more. “We are here, in the organizational core. What we need you to do is immediately put an anti-bullying program into practice. Make it clear to your own students that any action they take to combat bullying - within reason - will not result in point deductions or detentions, and give them the tools to take those actions. Also, any bullying in your own house? You ruthlessly suppress it. You make your dormitories and common rooms an absolutely safe place.”

Harry stepped in. “Once you have that in place, you’ll have students who want to get more involved. Bring them into the Activist circle,” Harry pointed to the second inner circle “and train them in more advanced techniques. We’ll be running workshops on rapid mobilization so they can back each other up. The goal is to bring students toward the center, so the structure remains intact once we graduate.”

“And we don’t write anything down or formalize anything.” Hermione insisted. “If we do, it opens us up to organizational attacks like banning clubs and whatnot if Umbridge decides to take her power trip further.”

“You really think she’ll do something like that?” Padma asked. “She’s been pretty bad but banning clubs?”

“She _measured_ Professor Flitwick in the middle of choir practice.” Hannah replied “I’m not putting anything past that woman. If she can think of a reason to ban clubs, she’ll do it.”

“But she can’t abolish houses, and if she gets rid of prefects, she loses all disciplinary control.” Padma agreed. “There aren’t enough professors to watch everyone. So as long as we don’t write anything down, we’re in the clear.” She looked at her own notepad, and somewhat despairingly, set it down on the stone floor and set it on fire with a quick incantation. 

* * *

Konrad tried to get through the following weeks without getting into terribly many fights. He went to class, did his work, and intimidated anyone he caught making anyone else’s life a nightmare, which was relatively easy with the reputation he was rapidly developing. It was a reputation he could get behind, and people were starting to call him Comrade Konrad in a way that wasn’t derisive. 

Still, the program to build a mass anti-bullying movement was slower than he would like. Each house had a few highly active participants from each year who watched out for everyone else, but it was slow going. It was, afterall, a british boarding school, a certain amount of bullying and hazing was going to happen. He was musing on that as the lunch break was nearing an end when Luna Lovegood caught him in the halls.

“Konrad” She said his name fairly evenly, but there was an edge to her voice. “I need your help, or rather, there’s someone in the boys bathroom who does. I can’t go in there so…”

“What’s the problem?” He asked, privately noting that she was wearing shoes. 

“I don’t know, there’s just someone crying in there and the halls are empty, I can’t find anyone else.” 

“Alright, I’ll check inside, see what’s going on. Hold up for me, if you can?”

“Of course.” Her voice had an odd sing-songy quality to when she said it. She led him to the correct bathroom. What he found in there broke his heart. A first year, crying so hard that there weren’t tears anymore, cutting off his shoulder length black hair in clumps with a pair of scissors. Konrad recognized him as one of the kids who got sorted into Hufflepuff house by the name of Gideon, he thought. Good name.

When Gideon noticed Konrad, he recoiled, and tried to hide in one of the stalls before Konrad could do anything, but he slipped on the wet floor and fell backwards in his blind panic, which could have been pretty bad given the hard tile. Konrad however was very fast with his wand and managed to get a levitation charm off to keep that from happening. 

“Gideon, what’s wrong? Why are you cutting off your hair, it was so schön.”He walked over, helped Gideon to their feet and got down on eye-level. “Something must have happened, ja? Was someone making fun of you for it?”

Gideon nodded wordlessly. 

“And why would they do that? It was gorgeous and must have taken a while to grow.” Konrad then noticed that Gideon didn’t have hair on his arms at all, not even peach fuzz. Which was when the pieces clicked together in Konrad’s head and he asked a question, hoping he wasn’t wrong. “Do you by chance have something other than Gideon you would like me to call you? Is that why you grow your hair out and shave your arms?”

“Sarah?” Sarah was treating it like a negotiation, asking to be called by her real name, no, begging, which just would not do. 

“Okay. Well it’s good to meet you Sarah. Mein Name ist Konrad.” Sarah threw her arms around him in the biggest hug her tiny little body could manage. Well, not so tiny, she was eleven not six, but compared to Konrad tiny. He hugged her right back. “Let’s see what we can do about that hair…” His wand was already out so he just tapped her head with it. “Como crescere.” It was a very simple Latin incantation, most commonly used for parties if someone wanted a new haircut or something; but invaluable for a situation like this. 

“I’ve always felt different, like my body isn’t mine. What’s wrong with me?” She asked.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes it just happens that way…” he tried to figure out a way to explain it that could be understood by someone who hadn’t even had The Talk yet. “It’s like the paperwork in heaven that assigns souls to bodies gets misfiled. There’s nothing wrong with you at all, but nature can be stupid sometimes. And it isn’t just you. There are lots of people like you, or me, for that matter.”

“What’s different about you?” Sarah asked.

“Well, you know how girls fall in love with boys, and boys fall in love with girls?” She nodded.

“Everyone knows that.”

“Not me. I fall in love with boys.” He confessed. “Nothing to be done with that but muggles have ways of making life easier for little girls in your position. And we’re wizards. We can do better, I should think. It just might take some time to figure out how. In the meantime, what would you like to do?”

“I… don’t know. I want to just be me, you know? At least have some place I can do that in.”

“Well as it happens, I have an arrangement with your Prefects. If you want, we can go talk to them, make sure they know what’s going on and take special care to make things safe for you?” Sarah looked a bit nervous at the prospect. “And if that doesn’t work, I know Gryffindor house is safe, because their prefects, Harry Potter, and I keep it safe. Anyone who messes with you gets thrown out the window.”

“Konrad, is everything okay in there?” Came Luna’s voice.

“Ja, one moment.” Konrad replied, then whispered to Sarah. “Pretty sure you can trust Luna Lovegood too, actually, and she’s right outside. She’s how I knew to come and make sure you were okay.”

* * *

It finally happened. Professor Trelawney got sacked, on the first snowy day of the year. Mr Filch was hauling her worldly possessions - hastily packed into boxes and large trunks - into the entrance courtyard in the outer bailey, sneering at the poor woman with sadistic contempt as he did so. Professor Trelawney was pleading with Inquisitor Umbridge for leniency, mercy, anything. She had nowhere else to go. Umbridge was basking in it, a self-satisfied smirk was worming it’s way across her face.

“Six...sixteen years, I’ve lived and taught here. Hogwarts is my home.” She was crying at that point, and seeing her like that, seeing anyone like that, made Konrad’s blood boil. He wanted to wipe that grin off Umbridge’s face, and in fact wipe out her face. “You… you can’t do this.”

“Actually, I can.” Was all Umbridge said, holding one of her decrees like some sort of release from all moral judgement. A testament to her will to power, Konrad noted. 

Professor McGonagall emerged from the crowd of students and rushed toward her colleague, holding her and putting her own body between her and Umbridge.

“Is there something you’d like to say, dear?” Umbridge asked, knowing that McGonagall coudn’t do anything that wouldn’t get her hauled away by Aurors.

“Oh there are several things I would like to say.” She did the best she could to comfort her friend, but it wasn’t doing any good. How could it?

Then the huge doors opened, and Professor Dumbledore emerged, clad all in grey, his beard reaching down almost to his waist. He strode forward and spoke in authoritative tones. 

“Professor McGonagall, might I ask you to escort Sybil back inside.” It was not a request. Not that it needed to be an order either. Umbridge wheeled on him, while Sybil Trelawney thanked him profusely as McGonagall got her the hell away from her tormentor. 

“Dumbledore, may I remind you that, under the terms of Educational Decree Number Twenty-Three as enacted by the Minister-” Dumbledore interrupted her.

“You have the right to dismiss my teachers. You do not, however, have the authority to banish them from the grounds. That power remains with the headmaster.”

Umbridge gathered herself up, she kept the grin on her face but her eyes, those cold ruthless eyes that understood no such thing as love or pity glared back at the old man. “For now.”

Dumbledore didn’t say another word. He turned around and called to the assembled students “Don’t you all have studying to do?”. The crowd began to disperse, but Harry emerged from the crowd, calling after Dumbledore, who didn’t stop, even with Harry calling his name. 

Konrad understood they had a special relationship of some kind, Harry was an orphan and his home-life was bad enough that he preferred people trying to kill him, so he supposed it was like having a surrogate grandfather. Konrad followed at a distance, he didn’t really have a choice, but eventually he found Harry looking around confused and obviously hurting. Konrad couldn’t figure it out himself.

Konrad couldn’t do much for him but step up beside him and jostle him convivially. “He’s got a reason. If you trust him, you have to believe he’s working with information you lack. Maybe he’s trying to protect the school, maybe it’s something else. If you don’t trust him, that’s a different story.” 

Harry seemed to relax fractionally. “I just wish I knew why. He didn’t even talk to me at the hearing, before or after. Even the general subject heading would help.” Harry shook his head, clearly still bothered by the whole thing, but wanting to move on to discuss other things. “Come on, we should go find Hermione and Ron. I don’t think we can keep in a holding pattern with her much longer.”

“On that, we certainly agree.”

* * *

When they did get back to the Gryffindor common room, Hermione was already in a frothing rage. “That foul evil old gargoyle! She’s terrorizing the professors, we’re not learning how to defend ourselves or pass our OWLs. She’s taking over the entire school!”

The radio was on in the background and Harry turned around, something caught his ear and he turned up the volume. It was Fudge.

“Furthermore, we have convincing evidence that these disappearances are the work of notorious mass murderer Sirius Black” Which meant two things. The first was that people were disappearing, and the second was that the ministry was in denial about the culprit on account of Sirius Black not actually being a mass murderer. Well, except insofar as killing Deatheaters counted as anything but a public service. 

It was almost on cue though, the coals burning in the fireplace crackled and a voice emerged. “Harry!” Everyone turned around and saw a face constructed from the burning coals, one that Harry immediately recognized as his godfather, and everyone gathered around the fire.

“Sirius! What are you doing here?”

“Answering your letter, but who’s that?” The charcoal eyes, fixed Konrad’s gaze. 

“A friend. Konrad, this is my godfather Sirius Black. Sirius, this is Konrad, he’s a transfer student from what used to be the uh Markus Wolf Special Pioneers Institute.”

“Oh! A communist eh? Can you trust him?” Sirius asked, and there was surprisingly no venom in the use of the term 'communist'.

“He’s aware of the situation, and wants to help.” Harry replied. 

“Good. A pleasure to meet you Konrad.” Sirius replied with genuine warmth. 

“The pleasure is mein, truly.” Konrad answered back.

“So you said you were worried about Umbridge. What’s she doing? Training you to kill half-breeds.” Sirius asked.

“Besides torturing students she’s not letting us use magic at all.” Harry answered. 

“Well I’m not surpris-what?!” He was going to talk about the second part, but then his brain caught up with the first part.

“Ja. Uses quill pens in detention that cut the lines she has people write into their flesh.” Konrad answered after Harry stuttered, reliving it for just a second probably. If a fire could be said to freeze in apoplectic rage, that is what happened.

“Would you like me to come up there and rip her throat out?” He asked.

“No! I think that would just make things worse, but why aren’t you surprised she’s not letting us use magic?” Harry snapped out of it, the fugue was very brief.

“The latest intelligence is that Fudge doesn’t want you trained in combat.” Sirius replied. 

“Combat? What does he think, that we’re forming some sort of wizard army?” Ron asked. “How does that make any sense? How would fifth year students fight the Aurors?”

“That’s exactly what he thinks, that Dumbledore is assembling his own forces to take on the Ministry. It isn’t rational, he’s becoming more paranoid every minute.” He paused, considering. “The others wouldn’t want me telling you this Harry, but things aren’t going at all well with the Order. Fudge is blocking the truth at every turn, and these disappearances are just how it started before. Kidnapping and murdering muggleborn wizards and so-called blood-traitors.”

“So, what can we do?” Harry asked.

There was some sort of sound in the background on Sirius’s end. “Someone’s coming, I wish I could be of more help. But for now at least it looks like you’re on your own.” The look on Sirius’s face while Harry’s transitioned from neutral to mild terror was so incredibly sad, it was the look of a man who was powerless to help his own son. But then it vanished and the fireplace returned to a normal source of light and warmth. 

The snowstorm outside was intensifying and Hermione walked toward the window and stared out it. “He’s really out there isn’t he… We’ve got to be able to defend ourselves. If Umbridge refuses to teach us how we need someone who will.”

Hermione turned around and looked at Harry, as did Ron. Harry looked at Konrad and their eyes all shifted to him. 

“Well I am, how you say, on board with the idea.” Konrad replied “And both Harry and myself are certainly competent so… co-instructors?”

“Honestly I was hoping you’d do it Konrad I’m… I’m no good at it, having me teach people is completely mad.”

Konrad sighed, reached out, and squeezed Harry’s shoulder. “Harry, you did fight Voldemort and survive. No one else can say that. And you’ve also survived four years of people trying to kill you. Don’t sell yourself short. Also: What is this Order? Have you three been holding out on me?”

Ron answered that one. “Order of the Phoenix, mate. They formed to fight Voldemort the last time when the ministry failed.”

“Yeah they won’t actually induct me though, Ron’s mum thinks she can shelter me.” Harry complained. 

Hermione nodded “It’s sweet really, and deluded, but sweet.”

“Hey, that’s my mum you’re talking about…” Ron protested weakly.

“Yes, and she thinks of Harry like one of her own children and wants to protect him. It’s sweet; but it’s also dangerously wrong.” Hermione countered.

“Well I certainly understand the desire not to utilize child-soldiers. However, ja, I am forced to agree. It is dangerously wrong. Voldemort has already proven that he won’t abide by the laws of war and will target children specifically. So… what do you say Harry? 

“Bloody hell…” He grumbled “Alright. It looks like we’re forming a student militia.”

“Wunderbar!” Then Konrad felt a little imp of the perverse creep into his soul. “Besides, if you’re going to be pre-convicted of something, you might as well do it.” He grinned wolfishly. “We can read Sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong, then kick off the Cultural Revolution and start killing landlords.”

“What?!” Hermione regretted the suggestion immediately, Harry and Ron laughed their asses off.

“I’m kidding!” Konrad put up his hands in a placating gesture. “But seriously though, raise your hands if you actually like landlords.”

No one raised their hands, and Hermione sighed. “I’ll talk to the other prefects, and we’ll get a group together. We probably don’t want to open with the Cultural Revolution though.” She eyed Konrad. “Deatheaters. We’re learning how to fight Deatheaters.”

“And the bourgeois state…” Konrad muttered.

“I’m enabling a maniac, but that… isn’t any different from normal.” Hermione grumbled. “So what are we going to call it?”

“I don’t know, uh, Dumbledore’s army?” Harry suggested. 

“Nein! Bad plan. If it’s discovered you might as well sign his death warrant. I would recommend… Community Defense Committee.”

“Isn’t that also the acronym for the Centers for Disease Control in America?” Hermione asked. 

“Ja, but fascism is a cultural and political disease.”

  
  


* * *

It took a few days to make the arrangements, long enough for a meter of snow to cover the streets of Hogsmead and force them to trudge through self-made footpaths in the snow. 

“How many people are supposed to meet us here anyway?” Harry asked. 

“Oh, just a few people…” Hermione evaded. They went into a small pub, the door said it was closed but the door opened just fine. “I made arrangements with the proprietor.” Hermione explained. She really had thought of everything, and Konrad was suitably impressed. They got to work setting up hairs in a semi-circle looking in on four others, like an auditorium. Then people started filing in. The Patil twins were first, then Hannah Abbot and Ernest MacMillan, Anthony Goldstein, Luna Lovegood, Colin Creevy, Neville Longbottom, Fred and George Weasely, Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Gina Weasely, and a few others. 

Hermione wasn’t the best at public speaking, no matter how forceful she could be privately, so when she got up it was a bit halting. “Uh… Hi. So, we all know why we’re here. We need a teacher A proper teacher. One who’s had real experience defending themselves against the dark arts, and it turns out we have two.”

“Why?” Asked a student in the front row who Konrad didn’t recognize. 

“Why? ‘Cause You-Know-Who’s back, you tosspot.” Ron intercepted the question with his characteristic deftness.

“So he says.” The student replied

“So Dumbledore says.” Hermione hit back. 

“So Dumbledore says because he says. The point is, where’s the proof?” Which Konrad thought was fair, and answered back. 

“If it were nonsense, the Ministry wouldn’t be lashing out like a scared animal caught in a trap.” Konrad added his two cents in, when another student spoke up.

“Maybe if Harry could tell us more about how Cedric Diggory was killed?”

It was at that point, Harry stood up. “I’m not going to talk about Cedric, so if that’s why you’ve come, you might as well clear out now. Come on Hermione let’s go, they’re only here ‘cause they all think I’m some kind of freak.”

Luna knew exactly what to do. “Is it true you can produce a corporeal Patronus charm?” Which stopped Harry from simply leaving.

“Yes!” Hermione responded enthusiastically. “I’ve seen it.”

“Blimey, Harry, I didn’t know you could do that.” Dean Thomas looked impressed. 

“And he killed a Basilisk, with the sword from Dumbledore’s office.” Neville joined in.

“That’s true, and in third year he fought off about a hundred dementors at once.” Ron added to the mix. 

“And last year, he really did fight off You-Know-Who in the flesh.”Hermione finished. It was spin, and Konrad knew it. He was lucky to survive, and Harry squirmed. 

“Wait. Look, it all sounds great when you say it like that, but the truth is most of that was just luck. I didn’t know what I was doing half the time, I nearly always had help. From Ron, Hermione… Cedric, others. Facing this stuff in real life is not like school. In school if you make a mistake you can try again tomorrow; but out there, when you’re a second away from being murdered or watching a friend die right before your eyes… You don’t know what that’s like.” Harry sat down, spent. Konrad stood up.

“We can’t teach you what it’s like either. We can just give you the tools you’ll need to survive it. This country isn’t safe, hell this world isn’t safe. They can teach you the spells at school, that isn’t the problem, it’s easy, even if they refuse to do it. It’s keeping your head under pressure, it’s being able to think through panic. It’s being willing to caste the spell that ends someone’s life before they end yours. That’s what Harry and I can teach you.”

“Why you?” Dean asked. “Harry I get, but why you?”

“I have the video for why…” Colin replied cheekily.

“Thank you Colin, but no. Not that.” Konrad took a deep breath, regretting the fact that it was a non-smoking establishment. “I didn’t actually finish my sixth year back in East Germany. I merely survived it; and I was one of the lucky ones. Our headmaster was not so lucky. Neither were most of my friends...” He couldn’t stop himself, his voice cracked and he felt tears run down his face just thinking about it, but if the silence in the room was any indication, no one doubted that what he was saying was true. 

“And that’s why we need their help.” Hermione rescued him. “Because if we’re going to stand any chance of beating… Voldemort,” saying his name took some effort for her “we have to rely on ourselves. The adults can’t or won’t save us, and He doesn’t care that we’re not adults.”

Colin looked terrified. His eyes were wide as the realization dawned on him that this was real. 

The next half hour was like the process of crewing an old wind-jammer naval ship. Everyone lined up and made their mark on a sheet of paper with a quill. But that was just the start. 

Crossing the bridge from Hogsmead, Konrad was finally able to smoke, in the back and down-wind, but he could do it. Harry came alive in a strange way and Hermione was positively radiant, all of the Weasely siblings had joined them, along with Neville Longbottom. Luna Lovegood was hanging out with Konrad in the back and they had their own little conspiracy going on.

“You have any luck figuring out how to help Sarah with her little problem?” Luna asked, sotto voce.

“Nein, nothing in the medical section of the library, at least nothing outside the restricted section.” Konrad replied.

“Hmm.” Luna scrunched up her face in thought. “When I first got to Hogwarts, I did a lot of research on Rowena Ravenclaw. Did you know that there’s no record of her prior to adulthood? There are church records of her family, including her brother Richard, who vanishes from the historical record at the age of twenty-three” Luna winked “but no Rowena.”

Konrad raised an eyebrow. “You’re thinking she might have come up with something that got suppressed?” 

“And changed her name after she came up with it, but the church didn’t do name changes? _Parish_ the thought.” The pun was deliberate, and she smirked. “Unfortunately, her diaries are also in the restricted section.”

“We’ll need to get someone to let us in there, or break in… “ Konrad suggested, which was when Harry interrupted the train of thought. It had otherwise been a triumphant but silent march across the bridge, but the enthusiasm burst forth.

“Right, first we need to find a place to practice where Umbridge won’t find out.” Harry was thinking aloud more than anything, but the others chimed in. 

“The Shrieking Shack?” Ginny Weasley had the first suggestion, but Harry nixed it as too small. 

“Forbidden Forest?” Hermione’s suggestion was technically workable, but Ron summed up the group consensus. 

“Not bloody likely.” He said in no uncertain terms. 

“Harry?” Ginny asked. “What happens if Umbridge does find out?”

“Who Cares?” Hermione answered “I mean, it’s sort of exciting isn’t it? Breaking the rules.” She was grinning from ear to ear and Ron had no choice.

“Who are you and what have you done with Hermione Granger?” He asked. 

Konrad, thought for a second, and resigned himself to what he knew from experience could be a terrible fate. He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled over the side of the bridge. “We’ll need to take other precautions. As it happens, I know the Fidelius charm.”

Everyone stopped and Konrad almost ran into George. They turned and stared at him. 

“What? You don’t think we didn’t take precautions against getting tortured for information, do you?” He tried to be casual about it, but a face flashed before his eyes. A very calm, very happy clean shaven man with round spectacles. He could practically hear the incantation for the cruciatus curse in his ears and he could feel his body tense. 

It was only the tight grip on his shoulder and the shake that snapped him out of it. It was Neville. “You alright?”

“Sorry. Bad memories. And he’s dead now...” He apologized. “At uh… at any rate.” He took another drag from the cigarette to clear his mind and stop the shaking in his hands “I can cast it on whoever you want to keep the list, or use it myself. I do have some skill at occlumency, though haven’t mastered it yet. If someone uses legilimency, they’ll know I’m lying, but I can keep them out.”

“Right. So I nominate that Konrad be our Secret Keeper.” Hermione made the suggestion.

“You mean our… General Secretary?” Harry smirked while saying it. Hermione groaned, and Konrad laughed. It was a good etymological pun and he loved it.

“Wait? Why was that funny?” The Weasley twins asked simultaneously, which was so not the norm for them not to get a joke that it caused everyone else to laugh at their confusion.

“Okay, so we should probably all come up with a list of possible meeting locations….” Harry went on.

* * *

It wasn’t even the next day that a new Educational Decree, this one numbered 68, was up on the wall in the hallway leading to the great hall. They were so numerous that they were running out of space. This one banned all student organizations on threat of expulsion. 

It was a sunny, chilly day, so Konrad was out on the balcony doing what he always did, and sifting through the lists of possible locations for a meeting place. Now that Umbridge somehow knew there was an organization and had preemptively banned it, having a secure location was the most important thing. The haunted bathroom that Moaning Myrtle un-lived in was the most promising, but then they would have to put up with her lecherous antics and self-esteem problems. The forbidden forest was looking like the next best place, but Ron wasn’t going to like it. Konrad had a list of pros and cons drawn up when Neville burst into the common room. 

“I think I found where we can meet…” He sounded meek and uncertain, but that was Neville. He was also extremely excited, which was most certainly not normal for Neville outside herbology class. 

“Really?” Konrad cocked one eyebrow. “Not a normal place, did it just sort of appear to you out of thin air?” He meant it literally, this was a magical school afterall. 

“Uh…” Neville’s eyes went down-cast. “Yes, actually.”

Konrad got up “Well then let’s go take a look.” 

Hogwarts was a labyrinth at the best of times, and while Neville even had a rememberall for when he forgot something, which he often did, he managed to navigate to the place he wanted to go perfectly. That, all by itself, got Konrad thinking. When they came to a blank wall, he gave Neville a skeptical look. 

“Just give it a second…” Neville insisted, and after a moment, a door materialized out of the stone and opened of its own accord. They both stepped inside and it was… basically what he imagined Neville thought a training space might look like.

A long straight hallway, with diving lines on the floor along each side creating a series of linear spaces for sparring. The walls were all padded, as was the floor. There were also magi-mechanical training dummies in each one. The central passage was wide enough for everyone to gather round in a circle for or to line up to try out new spells before they broke off into pairs or small groups. Konrad wondered if it was re-configurable. 

“I’ll hold down the fort here. You go get Harry and the others. I have some experimentation to do.” With Neville gone, Konrad stepped outside. There was no way there was just a secret training room lying around in Hogwarts that conformed to what someone like Neville expected wizard combat training to need. He waited for the door to disappear, and then thought very hard about what he actually needed. The door reappeared, and he stepped inside. 

“Das ist beßer. Dies ist perfekt.” He said aloud. It was bigger. Much bigger, with four quadrants. One had the instruction and formal sparring spaces the old one had, because for basic stuff you still needed that. Another was a large room, separated from the others. He went into it, and it was an urban combat arena that looked like a muggle laser tag establishment, but more detailed. Elevated positions, cover, hallways with blind intersections, rooms that could be cleared, glass windows and bits of flotsam and jetsam that could be used for all kinds of purposes. Another quadrant was a forest. A very much non-euclidian forest because this whole thing had to be bigger on the inside than the outside, but a forest nonetheless; and in the center of that forest was a small cottage. The fourth quadrant was less a lecture hall as an amphitheater so things could be demonstrated. Last but not least, the ceiling. It extended far far more than it had any right to, aerial combat was an entirely different beast afterall. Off in the corner, there was also a little nook nestled up against a wall with a sign that read ‘Ausgewiesener Raucherbereich’ with an ashtray and what looked to Konrad like a fume hood to keep everyone else’s lungs unmolested. 

The others arrived just as he was finished with his own internal tour and Neville’s jaw dropped. “It… I wasn’t like this when I left.” he said.

“Sorry, did a bit of redecorating. You didn’t go far enough Neville!” Konrad called from across the cavernous space, grinning like a crazy person.

“You’ve done it Neville. You’ve found the Room of Requirement.” Hermione congratulated her friend, while Ron looked like a landed fish.

“The what?” He asked.

“Also known as the Come-and-Go room.” Hermione explained without actually clarifying anything. "The Room of Requirement only appears when someone has a real need of it, and is always equipped for the seeker’s needs.” 

“So… if I really needed a toilet?” Ron asked the follow up question, and Konrad pointed toward the unisex bathroom.

“Thank you Ron… but yes. That’s the general idea. And I see we have spaces for… I don’t even know what all of this is for.” Hermione always did admit when she didn’t know things. 

“I figured it might respond to the perceived rather than actual needs of the seeker.” Konrad explained. “Neville thought combat training is about lectures and dueling, and there is that. But it is also more. Plus amenities.” The smoking area and the bathroom, for instance. “Demonstration, lectures, individual practice of course. But also aerial combat, structure assault and fighting in various other sorts of natural terrain, urban combat or fighting in tight spaces.”

“This is great. Thanks guys!” Harry was particularly enthusiastic. “So, how do we get people here if you’re the secret keeper?”

“Anyone I tell knows where it is. But they cannot spread the information. They could still physically bring someone though, it’s a limit of the spell. So one of the rules has to be that I vet every person who gets brought in.” Konrad explains. 

Konrad strode over to the smoking area and lit up a cigarette, the negative pressure gradient carrying the smoke into the vent. “Questions, possible legilimency.” He said. “Sort of depends on the person. Obviously those who already signed up are good to go, and I’ve already destroyed the original list. After memorizing it, of course.”

* * *

That evening, there were some thirty other students in the Room of Requirement, attending a lecture. They were in the stands of the amphitheater while Harry and Konrad stood on the raised stage. The lights were a bit omnipresent, and Konrad wanted them to pay attention, so with a wave of his wand and the incantation “Nox” he extinguished the lights. 

“Lumos.” He pointed his wand to a single set of lights at the top of the amphitheater which proceeded to glow like a stage light. 

“Good evening everyone. Welcome to the first meeting of the Community Defense Committee.” Harry started. “Tonight, we’re going to talk about why we have to fight, and then how. In a conceptual way first, then we’re going to teach you three particularly useful spells. Konrad and I will be bouncing back and forth so keep that in mind, we have different strengths, and we’ll play to them.” He indicated to Konrad, who, true to form, had a cigarette in his lips on the stool he occupied. Far away from Harry, who continued. 

“In short, Voldemort is back.” When he mentioned the name there was a collective shudder, because he was so scary he was referred to by euphemism. “But let’s be honest, he wouldn’t be half as bad if he didn’t have followers. And people follow him for a reason. So why do people follow Voldemort, and why must they be opposed, even after Voldemort is dead again? To answer that, I am going to turn the stage over to Konrad.”

“I am actually going to spare you the diatribe about political philosophy.” The audience sighed in relief. “All of you have decided to fight already, so I don’t need to convince you; and we’re all coming from different places anyway. That said, this fight is going to go beyond Voldemort. He does not and never has acted alone. Even now, he has influence in the Ministry by way of his so-called-former Deatheaters like Lucius Malfoy who kept their positions after the last war. While today we are learning how to defend ourselves and our school, there may come a time when we must do more than that, to go on the offensive and destroy the enemies of decent and right-thinking wizards.”

Harry took over. “We’ll start talking strategy later, once it is more relevant. We’ll also go through small unit tactics but you’re not ready yet. For now, let’s talk about actually fighting. Who can tell me what the most useful thing you can do in a fight is?” For a second, there was silence. Then Hermione raised her hand and Harry nodded at her. 

“Getting the first spell off. It puts them on the defensive immediately, reacting to you even if you miss or they block it.”

“Yes!” Harry replied enthusiastically. “Ideally before you ever get into a fight - and this is true whether fighting as an individual or in groups - you want surprise and concealment on your side, and to hit the enemy with as much as you can. So surprise, concealment, and overwhelming force. That maximizes your chance of, well, living. I didn’t have those things often enough and I barely scraped by. You want all three whenever you can.” He paused, swallowed, and continued. “It was why Cedric died. He might have been able to take Peter Pettigrew out and we both could have escaped, but he gave a warning first, and that let Pettigrew get the drop on him with a killing curse.”

Konrad put the cigarette out and tapped himself with a cleaning charm, then walked over to Harry and put an arm comfortingly around his shoulders, the shaky tension was obvious, but Harry snapped out of it as soon as contact was made. “Trust your instincts. If something seems dangerous, it probably is. Your mind is capable of recognizing danger even if you can’t figure out why you suddenly feel scared or nervous, and if you find yourself in such a situation, it can be better to simply run, or hex first and ask questions later. There is a muggle proverb: when you’re walking in the jungle and hear a twig snap behind you, best to assume it is a tiger stalking you. Who can tell me why?”

Neville raised his hand and Konrad nodded at him. “Because if it’s not a tiger you’re embarrassed. If it is a tiger and you ignore it, it b-bites your head off.”

“Richtig! Ja. So, say you don’t necessarily have any of those factors on your side? How does any of this work? Well that is where OODA loops come in. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. If you get into the right mindset, you will be able to observe your surroundings and changing conditions, organize all the information so you know what the enemy is doing, decide on a course of action, and then act. All without succumbing to panic. And you’ll be able to do it fast. This is something we have to train into you though. If you do it fast enough, you can get inside your opponent’s loop, or you can feed them misinformation or taunt them into letting you inside. Then you have an advantage.”

“Is that what you did to Malfoy?” Colin asked.

“Ja. Mr. Crabbe thought he was surprising me, but I controlled every second of that engagement until Professor McGonagall showed up. They didn’t know my wand was out, they didn’t know I can cast shield charms, and I was able to bait them into a world of regret. So, speaking of which, there are three spells we should probably teach them, ja Harry?”

He let Harry go so he could walk to one side of the stage. Konrad summoned a few of the targeting dummies with a gesture of his wand and a quick transfiguration. 

“Right, so the disarming charm is one of the most useful spells in your arsenal.” Harry explained. “We all need wands to cast anything but the most simple controlled spells, even Voldemort has that vulnerability. If you can take their wand, you’ve rendered most wizards defenseless.”

Konrad interjected. “Most, not all.” He reached behind him to a holster that was at the small of his back and concealed under his shirt, flipped the latch with his thumb and pulled out a pistol. “This is a gun. Specifically an East German copy of a Russian Makarov semi-automatic pistol.” He’d told Harry he was going to do this during planning, so Harry was fine. Everyone else stared at him either in incomprehension or apprehension. “I say this, because even a disarmed wizard can still be dangerous. So unless they immediately put their hands up and surrender upon being disarmed…” He pointed his wand at one of the targeting dummies. 

“Reducto!” A magical bolt leapt from his wand and once it struck the dummy, completely disintegrated it into dust and slightly larger particulates. “Don’t be afraid to end them, or take further steps to incapacitate. They might have a spare wand, they might a gun, or throwing knives. They might have put a wrist strap on their wand to keep from being disarmed. You don’t know. The only safe enemy is one that is physically incapable of offering further violence.” Konrad re-holstered the gun.

Harry bounced off that prompt. “But you need to learn the disarming charm first.” He held out his hand. “The wand motion is a tight underhanded flourish that snaps down toward your opponent.” He showed them, swishing his wand very slowly toward the center-line in a tight circle, up and then snapping it back down. He demonstrated a few times from different angles to make sure everyone got it. “It’s important that the motion be tight, and that it happen during the incantation itself. That controls the energy of the spell. If the wand motion is too wide the spell might go wild and disarm you, if it’s not in-time with the incantation, it will just fizzle.” He put his wand up so he didn’t accidentally cast anything, then spoke the incantation. “Expelliarmus.” Slower a second time, making sure they could all pick up the syllabic emphasis. “Ex-pelli-AR-mus” and making sure to tap the R. A few repetitions until he was sure they got it. “Okay, I want you to practice without casting it while we make sure we’re ready for the next part.”

They did. Konrad could hear them practicing the incantation, correcting each other’s pronunciation. Hermione was going around helping people with the wand motions and making sure they tapped the R correctly. 

“Okay, so I’ll admit, I don’t know how to cast a shield charm.” Harry confessed. “It probably would come in useful, but it was supposed to be in this year’s book of spells and we’re obviously not learning that in class… But I am a quick study.”

“Don’t worry. I can teach you really fast.” Konrad winked. “And if you don’t pull it off, it is a pretty hard spell. I just cast them easily through, well… the bad kind of practice.” Konrad looked back, the students were distracted so they wouldn’t necessarily notice Harry being taught the spell on the fly. “So the wand motion comes in two forms. Fast and slow. The fast one won’t persist and it’s basically this.” He demonstrated, drawing the wand across his body almost like he was actually putting up a shield to block arrows. “The slightly slower way does persist until the shield is broken by incoming spells. Depending on how good you are, it might break after one, or several.” To demonstrate that, he drew his wand in an arc from a guard position and up crossing over his chest on the downward motion. “The incantation is Protego.” Konrad repeated it, slowly for syllable emphasis. “Pro-TE-go. Got it?”

“I think so.” Harry replied, nodding. 

“Okay, because if you don’t you’re going to get stunned. But that’s okay. It will be a learning experience for everyone, we can work with it.”

They let the others practice for a few minutes before Harry raised is voice again. “Right. So now you’re going to see a demonstration.” Both wizards went to opposite sides of the stage and squared off into guard positions, both with their legs bent to allow for flexible footwork, wands held out. 

With a rapid flick of his wand that might be used for fly-fishing Konrad started. He didn’t need to use the incantation for it but he did anyway.

“Stupefy!”  
  
Harry used the fast version of the shield charm and actually pulled it off on his first try, then attempted a disarming charm. However the time used for his defensive spell allowed Konrad to use the slower version of the same defensive spell, which remained up after deflecting the disarm. Harry tried to follow up with his own stunning jinx, but it too was absorbed without Konrad having to expend extra effort. Harry managed to recover fast enough to block the disarm Konrad sent back, but it put him on the back foot, only able to defend while Konrad attacked in a barrage of stunners and disarms that eventually, Harry failed to block, it wasn’t that the spell fizzled, he just wasn’t enough. Unfortunately for him, he was hit by a stunning spell and sent flying back into the padded wall on the sides of the stage.

Konrad was there offering him a hand up immediately. “Ow.” Harry said, without any real venom and grin on his face. “You got me pretty good.” Konrad grinned and shrugged sheepishly. 

Once Harry was up, he did use what happened as a teachable moment. “And that demonstrates everything we’ve been telling you. Konrad forced his way inside my OODA loop, and put me on the defensive. Did anyone catch how he did it?”

Anthony Goldstein piped up. "He used the first stunning jinx as a feint to give himself time to put up a stronger shield charm. It forced you to take time breaking it, which over-extended you and made you vulnerable to a rapid series of attack spells. Eventually, you just couldn’t keep up.”

“That’s right.” Harry replied, and Konrad gave him a questioning look. Harry seemed to get it and nodded. 

“Now, here is the thing though. That whole exchange? It does Harry real credit, because he just learned the shield charm five minutes ago while you were all practicing the disarming charm.” Jaws dropped. “Seriously, I’m not joking. And it isn’t the easiest spell.” Konrad lit up another cigarette mostly because his hands were unoccupied. Which was when Harry struck. Konrad caught the rapid motion out of the corner of his eye too late to do anything but try to duck, failed, and found himself flying through the air 

“Scheiße!” He exclaimed right before he hit the back wall. Still managed to keep the cigarette in his fingers though, which he considered a win. He lay on his back staring up at the vaulted ceiling in no small amount of pain, took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled the cloud of smoke slowly, like he was luxuriating in some sort of afterglow. “Was it good for you?” He asked. Harry appeared in his field of vision with a shit-eating grin on his face and offered him a hand up. Konrad took it. 

“So good.” Harry replied, and Konrad addressed the class while Harry backed off so he wouldn’t smell like foul rag-weed.

“Und that, mein Damen und Herren, is the value of surprise. Now let’s get to teaching you the Stunning jinx and shield charm; then we’ll have you break into pairs and practice on the dummies and see who wants to try their luck against each other.”

The next hour or so was spent running them through each spell. Neville managed to disarm himself, but everyone else got the disarm off correctly, and most people were able to stun the dummies successfully. Harry took Neville aside for some individual instruction, but Ron and Hermione decided to square off against each other, having both managed to get the shield charm off at least once. Hermione on her first try. 

The other students started taking bets, particularly the Weasley twins. George was acting as a bookie and Konrad got the sneaky suspicion that he was offering three to one odds on his little brother with less than familial solidarity in mind. Konrad acted as the referee, holding up his hand. 

“Okay, on drei. Eins, zwei, vier!” Konrad dropped his hands as the go signal and Hermione had her spell finished before Ron was even through the first syllable. 

“Stupefy!”

Ron flew across the room and into the wall padding in a confused wail that made Konrad giggle.

* * *

There was just something about the library smell. The clean smell of paper and ink helped Konrad feel safe in a strange way. He wandered through the stacks until he caught sight of his co-conspirator. Luna really was hard to miss, she was diminutive with platinum blonde hair that was almost white, and so pale it looked like she never saw the sun. No red eyes though, so she wasn’t actually an albino. She was skipping merrily through the stacks toward the restricted section, but Konrad wasn’t in a hurry. 

She was waiting for him when he got there, humming something to herself before she noticed him, which wasn’t until he was already beside her.

“Oh!” She said with a start, and the library itself hushed her for her trouble. She went to a kind of stage whisper. “You’re surprisingly stealthy for someone so tall.”

“Sorry.” Konrad replied a bit sheepish. “Force of habit I guess. Any luck with Professor Flitwick?” He asked.

“Hmmm. No. Honestly he wasn’t much interested in my request either, just said I wasn’t ready for anything in the restricted section.” She looked at the restricted section. It was in a walled-off chamber within the main library, protected by a cast-iron grating and roped off.

“May have to break in… Pretty sure Professor McGonagall won’t give us access.” Konrad looked at the dark set of stacks behind the grating, and took out his wand. 

“What are you doing? You can’t do it in broad-daylight!” Luna protested, still in a state whisper. 

“I’m not. But there’s no way a wizard school only protects the door to the restricted archives with a lock and key. Otherwise first years would be in there constantly.” He waved his wand and uttered an incantation.

“Revelio”

The stones and the grate were absolutely covered in glowing magic runes. Nothing harmful, but practically impenetrable with an alarm; they were tied in directly to the wards and powered by the massive ley-line underneath the school. There would be no breaching them without the key to the lock, which was undoubtedly on the librarian’s person at all times. 

“Can… can you read those? I'm only on my second year of Ancient Runes.” Luna asked.

“Ja. We’re not breaking in.”

* * *

They’d gotten through the classroom portion and taught everyone how to cast the blasting hex, now they were split into small groups practicing against dummies. Harry and Konrad were doing the rounds, making sure everyone was getting it. 

A young woman, Cho Chang, had trouble. Her spell kept fizzeling so Harry approached her, stood behind her and wrapped his arms around to take her hand and guide her through the sightly complicated wand movements a few times. She blushed, which Harry wasn’t in a position to see, but it was obvious to Konrad that she had a thing for him. It was equally obvious to Ron and Hermione who had their eyes glued to the exchange with facial expressions indicating ‘Oh really?’ in an excited way. Their heads were both tilted and their eyebrows were raised. Ron nodded approvingly.

She managed to cast the spell successfully and then whipped around, giving Harry a massive hug. 

“Woah there, right, thank you, good job…” Harry looked incredibly nervous as he disentangled himself from that as politely as he could. He did that, and then gravitated toward Ron and Hermione. They didn’t seem put off by that, they just accepted him into their presence, but it was something that caught Konrad’s eye. 

That particular session was wrapping up and it was time to go. They all had homework to do. “Okay comrades, that wraps us up for today. Remember, Mr. Filch is watching the main door, so use the escape hatch.”

* * *

In contrast to the lavish feast of the first day, the daily meals were more pedestrian, and also more British; and despite the reputation he found himself liking British cooking, or at least some aspects of it. The stews were good, and he particularly liked pasties and shepherd’s pie. Plus, British cheeses were magnificent. While he was devouring one of the shepherd’s pies with a particular gusto, the owl post arrived. 

Konrad was expecting the package that got dropped right next to his seat; a really old-looking broom. The kind that was basically a long stick with reeds for a brush.

“Finally got yourself a broom huh?” Ron asked, tearing himself away from his third roast beef sandwich. 

“Ja. It’s about time. My budget is limited, so it’s no Nimbus 2000, but it will get the job done.” Konrad replied. In truth, it was an older Cleansweep 5. It used to be top of the line back in the 1950s, but now it was the very basic model. “I’m no quidditch player. I just want to get into the high-spaces and be able to credibly teach people” Konrad coughed.

“I gotcha mate.” Ron stuffed his face again and Hermione stared at him. 

“Where do you put it all?” She was eating a chicken caesar salad with a cheese wedge and some fruit.

“My stomach, obviously.” Ron replied with a wink and Hermione rolled her eyes. Konrad finished eating and place his utensils in an X over the plate, to signal he was done. Everything vanished. 

“Okay. I must ask. Where does all the food actually come from, and where does everything go when we’re finished. In Germany, we took turns doing the cooking and dishes.”

“Oh no. Don’t get her started Konrad.” Harry cautioned him, while Hermione turned an angry shade of red. 

“House Elves.” Hermione said after a long moment. “Wizarding Britain uses House Elves as a servant class. Hogwarts treats theirs very well, but many families do not.”

The implications of that set in for Konrad. “So… the Elves here are not… are they paid? Are they unionized?!”

“You too, huh mate?” Ron asked and braced himself. 

“No. They’re slaves. Most wizards either don’t think about it at all or think that the idea of Elves being something other than slaves is a load of poppycock, and the elves apparently like it so… Um… Look I’ve already tried to get them to free themselves and they treat me like I’m completely mad.” Hermione explained, visibly angry.

“No no, Hermione. You’re not the crazy one. That is not normal. Even the West-German Elves are militantly unionized! They’ve been in guilds since the time of the Hanseatic League. But here, they’ve been slaves for so long they’ve been conditioned to like it! This country is verdammt verrückt!” Konrad stood up. “I can’t even… Nein. Nein nein nein. This is so unethical I don’t even know where to start. I need to go for a walk…” Konrad was quietly losing it. He picked up his broom, and stalked from the room. Behind him he could hear Harry.

“I’ll have to talk to him… Maybe see about having Dobby give him a talking to.”

Konrad went out to the courtyard and mounted his broom, and flew up to the top of one of the crenellated curtain walls that surrounded the fortress-school. From there, he could overlook that same courtyard and not be bothered. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and ignited it with the zippo. He sat there, smoking for a few minutes both literally and figuratively. He couldn’t think of a way to liberate the elves. Not in the short term. If they just went on strike that would do it, but they didn’t think that was happening was wrong. They’d apparently been in their current state for so long that they rejected alternatives. So he people-watched. 

Which was when he saw Colin Creevy, bundled up against the winter cold with his camera strap dangling from his neck. He was taking pictures of a snowball fight in the courtyard when several other students approached him. Konrad couldn’t hear the interaction, but it didn’t look good. He didn’t recognize any of them but one of them ripped the camera from his neck and levitated it above his head. Konrad took out his wand and started to re-mount his broom, when he realized he needn’t have bothered. 

The students engaged in the snowball fight turned on them, and started throwing snowballs, then spells. One of the bullies’ head turned into a pumpkin and they started a full pell-mell retreat back through the snow from whence they came. Colin was able to recover his camera from the snowy ground and it looked like he thanked the other students, all of whom were wearing Hufflepuff colored scarves. 

Konrad couldn’t help but grin.

* * *

Konrad toiled feverishly over several sheets of parchment with his quill, deriving equations and translating those into a combination of wand movements and speech that would shape magic into an effect. The other students were fifth years, proper ones. The raven-haired matron who patrolled the room stopped at his desk and peered at what he was working on.

“That isn’t the assignment I gave you, Mr. Albrecht.” She said. Konrad looked up at her and shrugged. 

“It’s already done, Professor.” He moved the sheets of parchment he was working on aside and let her see his work. It was the arithmantic derivation of the standard shield charm, with both major variants. She picked up the parchment and checked over his work. 

“Good work. So, what have you been doing to occupy yourself?” She asked. 

“Improving the spell, or rather, modifying it for an application outside dueling.” Konrad replied. With a querying gesture, she asked if she could look at it; Konrad nodded and pulled his quill away. Professor Vector looked over each sheet of parchment one at a time, not only checking the math - though she did use some red ink to make a few corrections to his notation because they were a bit different between Germany and Britain - but also dissecting the magical theory behind the spell itself.

“You’ve figured out a way to maintain the field through time by feeding it energy.” She said fairly neutrally, but there was a glint of excitement in her eyes. “You could probably clean this up and publish it, you know.” 

“I know, but there is a time and place for that, not now. Not with the state the country is now in.” Konrad replied. Professor Vector was a Slytherin, but she had little use for the toxic elements of her house. Thus far, she was the only one in that house that Konrad both liked and respected. Her ambition wasn’t for power or influence but for recognized meritocratic achievement; or so Konrad had gathered. She merely put up with the rest of her house. He probably couldn’t count on her overt support, he knew that, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t go tattle to Umbridge that he was developing new combat spells either. 

“I understand.” She replied with a nod. That was when Konrad had an idea. 

“Professor Vector, I have a favor to ask if that’s okay.” She eyed him, which he understood given his interests. “It’s nothing bad, harmful, or militant, I promise. I just need to access a book.”

She thought about it, visibly thought, looking at Konrad from a few different angles and trying to size up if she could trust that promise. “I’ll hear you out. After class.”

“Thank you.”

The rest of the class period went by about as slowly as molasses flowing across a countertop. Konrad finished all his work, and whatever else he assigned himself, and then waited. In reality, it was only about fifteen minutes. 

“Class dismissed.” Professor Vector said as soon as the clock struck two. Konrad stood up from his desk and otherwise didn’t move while everyone else filed out. “So Mr. Albrecht, what’s this about?”

Konrad didn’t really know how to approach it. “I need to get access to a specific set of volumes in the restricted section of the library. Specifically, Rowena Ravenclaw’s alchemy notes.”

Her eyes went absolutely wide “Are you insane? What on earth responsible thing could you possibly do with those? I don’t even know what’s in them but they’re _Rowena Ravenclaw’s_ notes! There’s a reason they’re restricted.”

“Yes Professor. But… it’s to help another student with an… unrecognized medical condition.” Konrad replied, and the Professor’s facial expression was all he needed to know that he needed to explain in much more detail. “The student in question is technically a male, but only technically. Her body is male, but her mind is not. It’s called being Transgender, and it has been recognized by muggle scholars for some time.” 

She eyed him, suspiciously. “This student came up in the last staff meeting, Mr. Albrecht.” She didn’t mention Sarah’s name. “We have been instructed to treat her with dignity by Professor McGonagall. But you think Rowena Ravenclaw wrote something down to what? Fix this student?”

“Jawohl! Rowena Ravenclaw’s evidently very accomplished twin brother Richard disappears from the historical record at the age of twenty-three. At the same time that Rowena Ravenclaw springs forth into existence at the exact same age. Professor, do I need to draw you a diagram? She was able to have children…”

“So you do want to fix this student’s body, and not their mind, not change their soul, but match the inside to the outside? Is the student on-board with this?”

“Yes to both questions. If she so chooses, Professor McGonagall could elect to live and work full-time as a cat. I see no reason why a transgender wizard should have to hate themselves when they look in a mirror, all because wizards in the eleventh century couldn’t embrace empathy and kindness over their religious convictions or whatever reason caused the knowledge to be suppressed.”

“I don’t… disagree. But potions aren’t exactly my area. Have you talked to Professor Snape?” Vector asked. 

“Do you think he would give a Gryffindor student access to the restricted section? I asked, he refused on that principle.” Konrad replied. “Professor Flitwick didn’t even hear the request and Professor McGonagall has too much on her mind right now for me to think of bringing this up.”

“Alright.” Professor Vector started writing the letter of permission. “But I will observe you personally while you do the research.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Konrad replied gratefully. “I don’t make a habit of abusing trust.”

Professor Vector smirked. “Trust, but verify, Mr. Albrecht.” At that he couldn’t help but laugh. Fucking Gorbachev. Unfortunately, that would have to wait, because no sooner said than done, a voice came over the magical PA system. Umbridge’s voice. 

“Good afternoon students, the following students must submit to questioning this afternoon.” She then rattled off a list of names. Konrad’s was on it.

* * *

It was like some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. Konrad was standing in line to be interrogated. There were half a dozen students in line in front of him, one of them, Cho Chang, he recognized from the CDC, how could he not, obviously crushing on Harry that she was. It was actually a bit surprising to Konrad that Harry hadn’t said anything to her at all about it. But then, he did have a lot on his mind. 

So far, no one had cracked, because they could not. It didn’t matter what she did to them, they could not be compelled to speak. It was as if the knowledge had simply left their brains. Umbridge wasn’t torturing anyone yet; he still had her office bugged and was trying to keep up with the take if there was something interesting going on; but they were divulging personal secrets with an alarming frequency. They also all drank the tea.

Konrad found that commonality to be deeply concerning, and indicative of veritaserum. It was one of the things he worried about with his own ability to keep the secret, he didn’t know if veritaserum influence counted as a willing disclosure. Still, there were ways of resisting that. 

Finally, his turn came. Umbridge emerged from her office and the second year Hufflepuff boy she’d called in before scampered out looking a bit woozy. 

“Ah, Mr. Albrecht, hand your wand to my secretary and come on in.” She commanded with that sadistic-sweet smile on her face. He did, because he had no choice. The secretary, a mousy little woman who looked like she didn’t want to be there took his wand and scribbled out a receipt. “Would you like some tea?” Umbridge asked. 

“Do I actually have a choice?” He asked. “I can smell the veritaserum.” It had a pungent odor. “In this country, it’s not legal to administer to minors.”

She got an even bigger smile on her face. “That’s true dear, unless you have the permission of the Minister. Which I have. So if you don’t have some tea, the consequences could be serious indeed.”

“Well then, of course I would like some tea.” Konrad didn’t want to think about what those consequences would be. 

She poured the cup, which was a polite gesture of course. “Sugar or milk?” 

“Neither, thank you. I’m afraid I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth.” He replied somewhat sarcastically. She set the tea down on his original writing desk and motioned for him to sit. He did, and sipped the tea. It was terrible, he probably should have taken the milk and sugar just to mask the taste of the potion that the tea obviously actually was.

“The dose is far too large....” He said, saying the first thing that came into his mind because that is what veritaserum did. He had to give her something to chew on, even as he entered into an occlumency trance and locked away the things he shouldn’t talk about, such as the CDC and the fact that the room was bugged, behind other thoughts. 

She grinned wolfishly. “Children shouldn’t question their elders or the Ministry.” She replied.

“Ich habe keine Götter, und keine Meister. Die Arbeiter der Welt werden sich vereinen und Leute wie Sie zerstören. Faschistische Fotze.” He replied, because his filter on most things was gone, that he had no gods, no masters, and uttered an indictment against her personally in the name of the working class. But he also just about had her on the veritaserum. 

“I’m afraid you are in Britain now, not Germany. We speak English here, Mr. Albrecht, and I don’t understand what you’re saying.” She replied, in a tone that was both condescending and threatening. 

“Dann hättest du mir keine veritaserum geben sollen.” Which was true, if she didn’t want him speaking in German she shouldn’t have given him mind-altering drugs. 

“What can you tell me about illicit student groups or activities?”

“Ich habe keine Ahnung, wovon du sprichst. Was Studentenclub?”

“Don’t play dumb with me. Is Dumbledore training an army?” She asked. “Where are they meeting? Who is a member?”

“Ich würde es dir nicht sagen, selbst wenn ich könnte. Aber Ich weiss nichts.”

“I know you’re lying to me Mr. Albrecht, I know you’re involved, you’re always involved!”

“Aber Schweinhund Umbridge, wie könnte ich dich anlügen?” How indeed could he lie? Because no truth serum compelled the truth, they merely lowered one’s inhibitions

Clearly growing frustrated, she was starting to turn red in the face. Some of the other students she could understand not knowing anything, but Konrad she’d seen amongst the conspirators, and more infuriatingly, she couldn’t understand much of what he was saying. Konrad figured it must be extremely frustrating for her. Konrad ‘sympathized’ with her there. In the form of mockery.

“Haaa. Dies muss nerven die von Ihnen Scheiße aus. Ich wollte nur sagen, verpißen. Dann hast du mich gezwungen, Veritaserum zu nehmen. Ich muss reden, nur nicht unbedingt darüber, was du willst. Haha! Warte warte warte, Ich kann lügen nicht mehr. Ich werde für dich singen ja? Jaaaa.”

“Have you changed your mind Mr. Albrecht? Are you going to tell me what I want to know in proper language?”

“Hast du etwas Zeit für mich? Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich von neunundneunzig Luftballonns. Auf ihrem weg zum Horizont” He was in fact ‘singing’.

She snarled and slapped him across the face before regaining her composure and snickered. “Well clearly, we’re not getting anything out of you with veritaserum. She walked over to her desk and picked up one of her special quills and a sheet of paper. “But let’s see if this will get something out of you.” She set both things down on the desk. “I want you to write ‘I must tell my secrets.’ As many times as you can until the message sinks in. 

He didn’t really have a choice, of course. If he refused it would only get worse. So he did, scrawling the words out in German. The problem for him was the veritaserum not only dropped one’s inhibitions, but it affected his ability to manage pain, and hold back memories he’d rather not relive.

Like the last time, it started fairly mild. But with each repetition it got worse as the magical quill cut deeper into the flesh of the back of Konrad’s hand; so unlike the last time, he started screaming; partly from the agony of cutting into his own flesh, but partly because of the other memories that got dredged up. He saw that spectacled face every time he closed his eyes, could hear the screams of other people, himself, Marius’ face contorted by the Cruciatus.

The Fideliius charm kept the torture from actually working to make him disclose the things it covered, but the combination of veritaserum, the counter-attitudinal writing, and the desire to end the agony, Konrad started disclosing other things.

“Ich habe drei andere Zauberer getötet, einschließlich meines letzten Vernehmers.” Which she couldn’t understand. “Er hat meinen Freund zum Wahnsinn gefoltert, also habe ich ihn gejagt und in Brand gesteckt.”

Umbridge didn’t know what he was saying, didn’t know that he was telling her that he’d set the last person to interrogate him on fire, but she caught the word for friend, without knowing its context or precise meaning as boyfriend inside his sentence so she pounced on it. 

“Friend? What friend and where is he? What has your friend done, my dear?” She asked, and it was obvious from the way she was breathing that she was experiencing intense pleasure at his suffering. 

“Marius ist im Sanatorium in Kuba. Er war unser Geheimtipp.” He’d been their secret keeper. “Ich werde dich zerstören.” He ended on a threat to destroy her. “Ich habe Schlimmeres gereinigt, als Sie von meinen Stiefeln.”

“Keep writing, dear.” 

Konrad did, the pain became exquisite and there was no doubt in Konrad’s mind that his screaming was audible outside. At some point, and about a hundred lines of text later, he ran out of tea and the potion started to wear off. He was able to control his breathing and stifle his pain, denying Umbridge her source of gratification. He also found himself able to speak English again. 

“Enjoying yourself?” Konrad asked, pointedly. She picked her wand up off the desk. “Go ahead. Do it. Use the Cruciatus Curse in front of God and everyone.” He was panting, sweating, and weak-kneed. He’d written so much with that cursed quill that his hand was covered in blood, but he wouldn’t give in. Wouldn’t show his hand that the prospect of being subjected to that again terrified him. She stared at him for a long second, and he stared right back. 

She reverted back to her too-sweet voice with a little giggle as a transition. “You’re dismissed.” Konrad didn’t need to be told twice, he legged it out of there as fast as his legs would carry him. He paused only long enough to get his wand from the secretary and then… he knew he stared at the door for a long moment, holding his wand in a white-knuckled grip thinking of just going in there and ending her. He was pretty sure he could do it before she could react, just spatter her broken body all over her little kitten plates. 

“Mr. Albrecht?” The secretary openly stared at his hand. “Go. Just go. It isn’t worth it.”

“No. No it isn’t.” Konrad growled, and left. He got as far away from that place as he could, as fast as he could, all the way up to the safety of Gryffindor Common Room, then back up to his room where he collapsed onto his bed. He had a body pillow that he wrapped himself around and descended into wracking sobs, as he did, memories flooded into his mind. He could feel Marius’s form nestled up against his like he was actually there, remembered him calling on the other students to resist fascistic oppression, organizing the resistance efforts… then the efforts to break him, what happened to him.

Konrad didn’t know how long he was like that, or when exactly he just transitioned to staring into the void.

“Konrad, you okay?” Konrad didn’t reply, he could hear Neville’s voice off in the distance, like he was down a long tunnel. Until he felt the hand on his shoulder. Then the panic. He grabbed that hand and had the body attached to it underneath him without even thinking about it, he saw red, but it was Neville’s face behind the red and somehow he had his wand pointed directly at the boy. 

“Oh God! Please don’t kill me!” That snapped him out of it. Konrad dropped his wand and released Neville from the pin as fast as he could, and Neville moved faster than he ever had before too, had his wand out and on his feet.

“I am so sorry Neville…” Konrad apologized with his hands up. 

“What the bloody hell was that!?” Neville asked, keeping his wand pointed at Konrad.

“I was having… an episode. I am so sorry you got caught in that.” Konrad replied “But… I have some bad memories and sometimes I...sometimes something happens and I start reliving them.”

Neville gave him the strangest look and uttered the incantation to turn his wand into a flashlight. Then his eyes went wide and he went white as a sheet. “Bloody hell. You’re covered in blood!”

“It’s mine, courtesy of Umbridge.” Konrad confessed. “She almost… she almost used the Cruciatus when I didn’t give her what she wanted.”

Neville lowered his wand and sat down on his own bed, which was next to Konrad’s. “And… it wouldn’t have been your first time? It was that bad?”

“Ja. I’ve been tortured before.” Konrad confirmed. “But that’s not the worst of it. Someone very dear to me was tortured so badly he… never really recovered. He may not ever recover. They… ” He tried to describe it but just couldn’t, not without reliving it again. “I can’t. We managed to get him to Cuba, they have good doctors there, but I couldn’t go with him. To get to me they could have hurt my parents, I had to get them out of the country too, but they’re muggles so it had to be to be inside the EU in a place where they spoke the language so… here.”

“Bellatrix LeStrange used the Cruciatus Curse on my parents, because she thought they knew where Harry’s parents were in hiding.” Neville confessed. “Did it until they were insane, I visit them at Saint Mungo’s sometimes.”

“Christ, Neville, I didn’t know, I’m sorry to dredge that up for you.”

“It’s alright, I was a baby when it happened and my grandmother is strict, but she loves me, in her way.” Which told Konrad all he needed to know about his grandmother. Probably compared him to his fatheer, constantly. “ I’ve never really known any different.” He tried to minimize it, but Konrad could see that it hurt. “Is that why you go so hard on… everything? Trying to get back at the kinds of people who hurt your friend?”

“No.” Konrad replied, but thought better of it. “Maybe a bit. I certainly hate them enough. But Marius was our Secret Keeper, Neville. I… it should have been me the first time; I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I let someone else do it, or let any of you take the risk without one.”

“Bollocks, why do you think it should have been you?” 

“Because I was expendable. That’s what a secret keeper needs to be, expendable. Because if they get captured, they’re going to die, or worse. Marius didn’t die, but he took everything they threw at him so I-” he hastily corrected “we wouldn’t have to. It should have been me. He wasn’t expendable.”

Neville eyed him evenly and nodded. “Marius was more than a friend, wasn’t he?”

Konrad nodded. “Ja. It isn’t a secret just…”

“Painful. I get it mate. I never really talk about what happened to my parents either. Did anything happen to the people who did that to you?”

“Let’s just say that when a bunch of us left school and the country, we made sure certain individuals got the Mussolini treatment.”

“I don’t know who that is…” Neville replied, but if his facial expression was any indication, he kinda understood the message. He went a shade paler looking at Konrad. But of course, Konrad figured he probably didn’t know much about the non-Grindelwald parts of the Parallel War.

“We’re really going to have to do something about the state of general education in this country. But… if it’s okay, I have a letter I need to write.”

“Of course mate, your parents?” Neville asked, standing up. 

“And Marius. I don’t know if he’ll be able to read it, but… I should write to him anyway.”

“Got it. I’m always right next door Mate.” Neville replied

“Same here Neville.”

Once Neville was gone, Konrad sat down at his desk and arranged his quill and parchment. Then he started writing a letter in code. He didn’t exactly have an enigma machine, so instead he used a book code pulled from the pages of his library, a library that his parents had an identical copy of. His father had been a civilian-side cryptographer so it should be easy for him, but unless one had all the books and knew which ones he was using, cracking the code would be impossible.

_“Vati, Mutti,_

_Verwenden Chiffre drei._

_Ich weiß, dass es eine Weile her ist, seit ich geschrieben habe, aber die Dinge waren beschäftigt. Leider sieht es so aus, als hätte Großbritannien seine eigenen Probleme._

_Sie haben einen dunklen Zauberer, der tot war, aber jetzt nicht. Derzeit manipuliert er die Regierung durch Katzenpfoten. Ich mache was ich kann. Seine Ideologie ist die Vorherrschaft der Zauberer wie Grindelwald._

_Wenn ich dir das Wort gebe, musst du rennen. Ich weiß nicht, wo es sicher sein wird. Kuba oder Albanien vielleicht? Albannia hat sicherlich genug Bunker ..._

_Ich wünschte, ich wüsste, warum das passiert. Vielleicht bin ich nur verflucht. Aber ich bin nicht allein. Ich habe Freunde hier, wenn noch keine Kameraden. Sie sind gute Leute und sie sind bereit zu kämpfen. Ich wünschte, Marius wäre hier, ich weiß nicht, ob ich bereit bin, dies ohne ihn durchzumachen._

_Mit all meiner Liebe,_

_Konrad._

_P.S. Ich habe Marius einen Brief beigefügt. Es ist nicht securitysensitive, so dass Sie es lesen können, wenn Sie wollen. Ich glaube nicht, eine Eule, die Reise machen, aber können Sie die Kanäle verwenden wir besprochen es an die Regierung im Exil auf Ernst Thällman Insel zu bekommen? Danke.”_

The second letter was in the clear, not in code. There was nothing of a compromising nature in it, it was just personal. But he didn’t keep secrets from his parents unless he had to, and there was nothing that would be in it that they didn’t know. 

_“Mein liebster Marius,_

_Ich weiß, dass ich nicht so oft geschrieben habe, wie ich sollte. Es tut jedoch weh, einen Brief zu senden, weil man weiß, dass man nicht antworten kann, aber trotzdem auf einen hofft. Ich kann nur beten, dass der Erhalt dieses Schreibens Ihnen hilft, sich auf eine kleine Weise zu erholen._

_Ich erinnere mich an die Nacht während unseres fünften Urlaubs am Baikalsee. Wir schwammen in den Tiefen dieses kristallklaren Sees und spielten mit den Robben. Ich wünschte, es hätte ewig dauern können. Dass die Dinge nicht so liefen wie sie. Ich wünsche mir mehr als alles andere, dass ich mein Leben mit Ihnen teilen könnte. Ich vermisse dich. Ich denke an dein Lächeln und sogar an die kleinste Berührung deiner Hand, und es bringt mich zum Weinen. Ich wünschte, die Vergangenheit könnte geändert werden, und ich wäre es, der leiden musste, und nicht Sie._

_Aber die Vergangenheit ist festgelegt. Wir können nur die Zukunft bauen. Wisse, dass du bei allem, was ich tue, meine Sonne, mein Mond und meine Sterne bist. Du führst mich, obwohl du nicht hier neben mir sein kannst. Ich hoffe, dass Sie eines Tages sein werden._

_Ich liebe dich,_

_Konrad”_

* * *

The next day, Konrad met with Luna and Professor Vector in the library just outside the restricted section. 

“I’ve taken the liberty of simply checking the relevant texts out myself.” Professor Vector announced as soon as both of the younger wizards arrived. “They won’t leave my sight, though I hope one of you speaks Old English, because that’s what they’re written in.”

“I do, Professor Vector.” Luna announced cheerfully. And they got to work. They divided the labor. Luna hunted through and found the relevant sections, transcribing them in old english while she spoke them aloud in very literal modern english. Konrad then went about the task of consulting reference materials to sift through metaphor and linguistic drift to put everything into a form that makes sense. 

Konrad got everything sorted into three piles. 

“So what do you have?” Professor Vector asked.

“I think… there are three. Something of a process.” Konrad said, he tapped the first pile. “This one can be taken weekly, and it blocks the onset of puberty. There are different versions for male and female puberty.” He tapped the second. “This one, similar separation, induces male or female puberty over time. There is even a calibrated schedule in here for partial reversal in say, a teenager, so they can take them and then revert to blockers until they’re adults.” Then lastly, the third. “This one, transitions the entire reproductive system. Rowena didn’t know about genetics though,” Professor Vector looked perplexed and Konrad groaned “think of it like the architectural blueprints for a human body. So they might have fertility problems due to mismatches. Someone who goes from female to male will only ever produce female offspring; while someone who goes from male to female will produce mostly males, and some miscarriages.”

“I had no idea muggles had that sort of thing figured out.” Professor Vector said. “But I’m curious, if you have some further reading?”

“Of course. Do you read German?” 

“I do.” Professor Vector replied. “I didn’t know the education system was so… different between our two countries.”

“Cultural and ideological differences.” Konrad replied. “We didn’t have a long summer break and had longer days. We were able to fit more subjects in, which included muggle history, science, and mathematics.”

“What about side-effects?” Luna asked. “Something this… complete… has to have them, there’s no way you can change someone’s body without it doing other things.”

“They’re mostly psychological. Rowena notes that she became somewhat more emotionally volatile during her changes, had acne issues and some muscle cramps. The final transition is… evidently very painful as well.”

“Sarah is going to be so happy about the news!” Luna was grinning from ear to ear.

“Don’t be too hasty.” Professor Vector cautioned. “She’s still a minor and we’re going to have to run this by adults. Madame Pomfrey was supportive in the staff meeting; but her parents do have a say until she’s seventeen.”

Konrad didn’t like that at all and grunted in frustration. “The puberty blocking potion can be administered to freeze the process, so at least things don’t get worse for her while adults work it out. It isn’t a change, just stasis. That way, she won’t start growing a beard and have to listen to her voice crack and change.”

“I think…” Professor Vector pondered that. “I think we can make that work. So long as Madame Pomfrey approves. She’s the one who has to make these, afterall. I’d ask Professor Snape, but...he’s Professor Snape. And of course we’ll need to talk to Sarah.”

* * *

Konrad found Sarah the next morning during breakfast. He walked over to the Hufflepuff table and simply sat down next to her with a big smile on his face. 

“Good morning.” He said. The other first year Hufflepuffs who were near her looked nervous, but he noticed that exactly no one was shunning her. 

“It’s okay guys. He’s cool.” Then she noticed the grin and her eyes brightened a few lumens. “Really? You found something?” It was almost like she was telepathic. 

“We did. Me, Luna, and Professor Vector. Talk to Madame Pomfrey, she’ll fill you in on the details.” Konrad replied, and was immediately assaulted with an eleven-year-old version of a bear hug, and a high pitched squee that hurt his ears. He ignored the pain and hugged Sarah back.

* * *

“Expelliarmus!” Neville did everything perfectly, and knocked the wand from Padma Patil’s hand. He wasn’t completely hopeless, he’d gotten other spells but for some reason until that moment, he just hadn’t managed it against a live person. The room erupted into cheers, and Konrad gave Neville a congratulatory bear hug. 

“Good job!” Konrad told him, and Neville, not accustomed to effusive praise from anyone, blushed in a kind of proud embarrassment as other students clapped him on the back and celebrated his success. Harry waited for the furor to die down and then cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. 

“So, that’s it for this lesson and we won’t be meeting again until after the holidays so, just keep on practicing as best you can and in the spring term we’ll be getting into more advanced topics. Have a great holiday season everyone.”

The mood in the room was cheerful, everyone was looking forward to going home for the holidays, and were wishing each other merry christmas as they departed through the escape hatch in the back of the room of requirement. He noticed that Cho Chang was sticking behind, staring at a little memorial to Cedric Diggory on the wall, and Harry was moving toward her, looking concerned, getting ambushed by the Weasley twins about doing some well-deserved prank on Umbridge. He waved them off and said goodbye to Luna as he moved, and Konrad took the opportunity to politely exit. 

Ron and Hermione were waiting for him and Harry just outside. 

“Harry might be… a minute.” Konrad confided in them. “Not sure what is up with Cho, but she stayed behind to talk to him.”

“Are you kidding mate? She’s been giving him the eyes for weeks now.” Ron replied in an ‘are you an idiot?’ tone. 

Hermione rolled her eyes “It’s more complicated than that Ron.”

“How much more complicated could it be? She likes him and she’s bangin! He was crushing hard last year, it’s about time is what I say.”

“I think… I think his feelings may have changed, Ron. To say nothing of what Cho has been going through..." Hermione said.

“Wot?” Ron was flabbergasted. 

“Well let’s see. She has feelings for Harry, probably feels conflicted because she’s still mourning Cedric, Umbridge interrogated her yesterday and threatened to sack her mums from her job at the Ministry; and she’s worried about failing her OWLs because she’s too busy worried about everything else. She’s going through a lot, and it’s doing her head in.”

Ron stared in disbelief. “How could someone feel all that, they’d explode?!”

Hermione sighed. “Just because you have the emotional range of a sea-squirt, Ron, doesn’t mean everyone else is similarly disabled.” She tried to keep a straight face, but couldn't. She started laughing, and Ron knew how to laugh at himself so he started laughing. Then Konrad… well there was no like in that statement so he joined in. 

Harry emerged a few moments after that and stopped, because the laughter hadn’t subsided. “What’d I miss guys?”

“Oh nothing, just laughing at Ron’s expense!” Hermione explained. 

“Spill the beans mate, what happened with Cho?” Ron demanded. Before Harry could answer, the door opened again and Cho was running down the halls, in tears. Once she was out of earshot Ron followed up. “That good huh?”

Hermione groaned. “I swear he’s like a brick wall. Nothing sinks in.” Konrad noticed that Harry was looking extremely uncomfortable. 

“Would you two give us a moment?” Konrad asked. 

“Sure…” Ron looked vaguely hurt, and so did Hermione, both wanted to be there for their friend but they also got the big-brother thing that Konrad was trying to do. They moved on, back toward the Common Room while Harry stayed behind. Once they were out of earshot and the hallway was otherwise empty, Konrad asked his question.

“What happened? You seem a bit, what is the term? Out of sorts?”

Harry let out a sigh. “And how… Cho tried to get me to kiss her under the mistletoe, but I didn’t want to and got a bit awkward.” He waved his hand down the hall in the direction she’d gone. “Everyone just sort of expects me to reciprocate, and I’ll admit I had a crush on her last year but…”

“Not anymore?” Konrad asked, open-ended so Harry could explain. 

‘Right. Even if I did, she’s still grieving Cedric and has a million other problems. What kind of cad would I be if I took advantage of that? And why me? Why not you? You have the whole ‘bad boy’ thing going on that girls seem to like. I just don’t get it.”

“Well I’m glad it’s you, because she’s far too young for me, and there are… other impediments.” It was long-past time Harry knew. “I am a homosexual, Harry. Had she tried to kiss me under the mistletoe, she’d be crying just as hard. Plus I am… not exactly single.”

“Oh, right.” Harry looked stunned, like a deer caught in headlights. “I had no idea. Does anyone else know?” A pause. “And, not single? You have someone back in Germany?” 

“Neville, a first year named Sarah, Luna probably. And you could say that. Marius isn’t... “ Konrad found he couldn’t get the words out, but Harry had him figured out.

“I’m sorry.”

“He might recover someday, but until then… well, I’ll wait. If he doesn’t… I don’t think I want anyone else.” Konrad replied. 

“I know things are getting bad, Konrad, I don’t think I could drag them through it with me. I’m a bloody basket case, and I know it. The nightmares alone…”

“So I’ve noticed, I do share a room with you.” Konrad squeezed his shoulder affectionately, and even knowing, Harry didn’t flinch away. “I imagine mine are similar.” Harry nodded in response to that. “But Harry, life is short, often painful. You should find what joy in it you can, in human connections. It’s the only way you’ll stay sane.” Konrad noticed a whole in his reasoning. “Even if that connection only really lasts a few hours or days. Just make sure it’s real, and you’re not exploiting anyone.”

Harry nodded. “I would have been exploiting Cho, I think…” Yes. Yes he would have been.

“Ja. Don’t do that. It hurts for her now, but she’d have ended up hating you for it.”

* * *

The moon was full in the sky, and the night was crystal clear; but where even at night there should have been insects chirping, owls hooting, and rodents scurrying underfoot in the Märkische Schweiz Naturpark, it was dead silent, which put Konrad on edge. 

Marius was looking around, his eyes were on a swivel, scanning the undergrowth, the tree-branches. Then a twig snapped, and both wizards whipped around with their wands out. Konrad was hit with a stunning jinx and woke up. He woke up to the sound of Harry clearly having another nightmare. Konrad got up and walked over to check on him. He was sweating bullets and straining against something, which wasn’t normal for nightmares, or even most night-terrors. His eyes were open and fixed in their sockets, not moving. Something was wrong, something was very wrong. It was the sort of resistance that accompanied forced legilimency. 

Harry woke up with a start, bolting straight upright. “Mr. Weasley is in danger!” That woke everyone up. He screamed it. 

“Go get Professor McGonagall.” It was a command from Konrad, directed at Neville, who bolted from the room as fast as his legs could carry him. Harry was not at all okay, he was shaking and bawling, whatever he saw must have been absolutely awful, and all Konrad could do was hold him until the Professor got there. She came in, still in her bathrobe, though notably wearing a wide-brimmed pointed hat a few minutes later. 

“Mr. Albrecht, help me get him to the Headmaster’s office. Ron, get your brothers and sister, meet us there.”

“Yes Ma’am!” Ron didn’t question Professor McGonagall, no one did. Ever. He just ran and did what he was told, while Konrad helped Harry up and supported him. 

“Harry, I need you to tell us everything.” Professor McGonagall ordered, and Harry did. It was almost incoherent, but it was something about a long hallway, Arthur Weasely being repeatedly bitten by a giant snake, and Harry himself being the snake. Konrad would have thought it a terrible nightmare, but it obviously wasn’t. By the time Harry got to Dumbledore’s office, he could move fully under his own power, but he was clearly shaken and drenched in his own terror-sweats. 

Konrad stood next to him, along with Professor McGonagall in the office; Ron, Gina, George and Fred arrived shortly after they did, and Headmaster Dumbledore started asking questions. 

“In the dream, were you standing next to the victim? Or looking down at the scene?” He asked, his baritone voice echoed through the room, but he didn’t look at Harry at all. The lack of concern pissed Konrad off.

“Neither it was like I was… Professor will you please just tell me what’s happening?” The headmaster ignored him and stalked to one of the pictures on the wall. 

“Everhardt, Arthur’s on guard duty tonight. Make sure he’s found by the right people.” He turned toward another one of the photos as the first disappeared into its own frame, ignoring Harry’s plaintiff request, again. “Phineus, you must go to your portrait at Grimmauld Place, tell them that Arthur Weasely is gravely injured and that is children will be arriving there soon, by port-key.”

Harry was becoming increasingly agitated. He was terrified, and the one person who knew for certain what was happening to him was ignoring him completely. Everhardt reported back that Arthur had been found, but that he’d probably survive the attack, and also that the Dark Lord failed to obtain something or other. What that could be, Konrad had no idea. 

Finally, Harry had enough. “Look at me!” He shouted, it wasn’t even angry, it was desperate and hurt. Professor Dumbledore wheeled around, but the look on his face was just as desperate. He wanted to help. He wanted to tell Harry everything, it was plain as day all over his face. But he couldn’t. “What’s happening to me?” Harry croaked. 

Which was when Snape’s voice, that silky smooth voice that sounded for all the world like someone who wanted to complain about the temperature of their soup at a restaurant, piped up from behind them. “You wished to see me, Headmaster?”

Still ignoring Harry entirely, Dumbledore replied to snape. “Severus, I’m afraid we can’t wait. Not even until morning. Otherwise, we’ll be vulnerable.” Without saying another word, Professor Snape unceremoniously grabbed Harry by the hand and hauled him from the room. It was so fast that Konrad couldn’t even process it, just be incredibly angry.

“Professor, he isn’t some piece of meat.” Konrad said coldly. “Harry is a human being, and this, this… verdammte Grausamkeit needs to stop”

Dumbledore glared back at him. “And what could you possibly know?”

“I understand that you fear his mind is compromised. I understand by whom. But you can do operational security while also respecting him and showing him the care and dignity he’s come to depend on and expect from you. It’s not like The Dark Lord can use legilimency on you through him.”

The glare softened. “I can't afford to tempt him… Professor McGonagall, please escort Mr. Albrecht back to the Gryffindor common room. I suspect he’ll want to be there when Harry returns.”

“Someone will have to be there to pick up the pieces. Snape is a terrible potions teacher. I can’t imagine his ability to teach Occlumency any better.” Konrad had no fucks to give. None at all. Professor McGonagall gripped his shoulder pretty firmly for a woman in her eighties.

“Come now Mr. Albrecht…”

* * *

When Harry stumbled through the door into the common room, Konrad was waiting. He had the bottle of schnapps, and didn’t give two shits about smoking a cigarette on the floor next to the fire. The flume carried the smoke up and out of the room. He’d been there a while, fuming in several senses of the term, and had gone through half the pack in the three hours Harry was gone. There was nowhere to be the next day, it was very early Saturday morning and the train left Sunday morning. 

Konrad tossed the cigarette into the fireplace and tapped himself with a cleaning charm, no use torturing the poor boy again. Harry saw him and plopped down on the couch. His whole body was shaking, he was on the edge of tears, so Konrad sat down next to him and drew him in closer. 

“Come here Waffenbruder, I’ve got you. Let it out.” Harry didn’t cry, but he did take the offer of putting his head on Konrad’s shoulder.

“Snape is teaching me occlumency.” He blurted out. “Because something is connecting my mind with Voldemort’s. “I can’t keep Snape out, he doesn’t teach me how to do it, he doesn’t even try. He just tells me to resist. I think he just wants to torment me.”

“I figured.” Konrad replied, took a swig from the liquor, and offered some to Harry, who took a somewhat bigger one. “He’s a gottverdammt awful teacher.”

“Yeah…” Harry removed his head from Konrad’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “You could teach me? I know you haven’t mastered it but you could at least teach me the basics?”

“I was going to offer, Harry. But in the morning.” Konrad took another mouthful of schnapps and let Harry have as much as he wanted. It would help him sleep. By the time Harry shuffled back up to bed, half the bottle was gone.

* * *

Harry was sitting down out on the balcony in a chair, bundled up against the cold. Konrad liked the cold, so he was just wearing a double breasted coat and his ushanka. Well, not just those things, he also had gloves, wool trousers and thick winter boots, but he didn’t look like the michelin man. 

“First of all, this is a judgement-free zone. I will never mock you for what you’re thinking, or disclose anything I discover to others.” Konrad paced, sucking down cigarette smoke while he explained. “So, here is what you need to do starting out, Harry. Just wanting me out isn’t enough. You need to fill your mind with something else. Something you want me to see instead of your actual memories and thoughts.” 

“What should I use?” Harry asked.

“Something simple at first. As you get better, you’ll be able to use more complex things, even trick the legilimens into believing things that aren’t true by mixing truth with fiction. I’m not there yet. The legilimens will know I’m blocking them.”

“Okay.” Harry nodded, and clearly resigned himself to having his thoughts invaded. “At least this time I’ll be having my thoughts invaded by a friend. Let’s go.”

Konrad pointed his wand at Harry’s head and spoke the incantation with a slight jiggle of the wand to focus the energy. 

“Legilimens!” 

What he saw, for a few moments, were nothing but flowers. Constantly shifting flowers because Harry couldn’t hold the mental image very well. They shimmered and flickered in and out of existence and focus, but eventually Harry’s ability to hold them in place in his mind collapsed completely. Which was when Konrad saw something he didn’t really expect. He terminated the spell, and Harry was gasping for breath. 

“I kept you out, at least a little bit!” Harry had a triumphant grin across his face, but it faded when he realized what Konrad got. “You… you won’t tell them, will you?”

Konrad shook his head. “Never. But you should. I don’t think they would be mad.”


	2. Spring Term

Konrad exited the train and then passed through the pillar to get to the muggle Kings Cross Station. From there he got on another far more conventional train bound for Glasgow where his parents were living. It was a straight-shot five hour trip, which let him sleep most of the way. When he got off the train, he used public transportation to get home. Or he would have, except he zoned out and missed the stop he needed and ended up having to cross through the massive cemetery complex in Northern Glasgow, at night. Needless to say he forced himself to be hypervigilant, which was why he spotted the tail. They weren’t wizards, just junkies out to mug him for drug money, but he didn’t want to be bothered. He ducked back behind a mausoleum and from there apparated the few hundred meters into his own backyard. Instead of walking in the front door, he walked in the back.

“Hallo Mutti, Hallo Vati! Ich bin zuhause!” He announced. Things looked different. Everything had been in boxes when he left, but now everything was unpacked and there were even some modern western conveniences. His parents were doing well enough to afford a television and a personal computer. Expecting him to have come in through the front door, they were a bit taken aback but not exactly surprised when he showed up behind them.

“Konrad! Wilkommen zurück!” His dad enthused and bear-hugged him. And it was definitely a bear hug, his father Jürgen was of a height with him and not small by any stretch. He’d been in the Army as a volunteer before getting married and having a kid, and he worked out. His mom was right there with him joining in what was rapidly becoming a group hug. 

“Ich bin froh, dass du in Sicherheit bist!” His mom, Judith, said, kissing him on the cheek. “Aber du rauchst immer noch…” She added, disappointedly. 

“Ja ja. Ich liebe euch auch, und Ich weiss, Mutti… es tut mir leid, aber ich kann nicht aufhören, es beruhigt meine Nerven.” They doted over him and chided him for smoking, but they loved him and were just happy he was alive. He loved them right back. 

“Komm Sohn, setz dich, schau mit uns fern und erzähl uns alles.” His father guided him to the couch and used the remote to turn on the BBC. Monty Python reruns were on. “Wir haben dir eine Antwort geschickt, hast du sie bekommen?” No… no he hadn’t gotten the reply. Which must mean that the Owl Post was being intercepted. Fucking Umbridge. He indulged them of course, and told them everything, down to the last detail except what was in confidence, including the possibility of the post being waylaid. 

“Natürlich kann man nicht dorthin zurück.” Mom just declared, in that way mothers do. It was understandable that she wouldn’t want her son being tortured again. She saw the look on his face and her heart visibly sank. “Bitte Konrad, du kannst nicht…”

“Ich muss. Ich werde nicht wieder fliehen, Mama. Ich kann nicht.” He replied. He had to go back. “Ich bin auch siebzehn. Nach dem Zauberergesetz bin ich ein Erwachsener.” They couldn’t make him go elsewhere, he was seventeen, and legally for wizards, an adult. “Es gibt nichts, was Muggel tun können. Der Krieg wird im Schatten geführt; und wenn die Faschisten gewinnen, werden sie Sie ungestraft unterwerfen. Wenn ich kämpfen kann, werde ich. Wenn ich sterben muss, dann sterbe ich. Ich werde das nicht zulassen.”

His father listened to the argument and then got up, only to kneel in front of his wife. “Er ist unser Sohn, aber Konrad ist auch ein Mann. Du willst ihn beschützen, aber dazu ist er weitaus fähiger als wir. Wir haben beide gesehen, was Zauberer tun können. Wenn es faschistische Zauberer gibt und die Leute gegen sie kämpfen wollen ... dann unterstütze ich unsere Truppen. Einschließlich Konrad.” The logic was a bit inescapable. Fascist wizards were terrifying, and only other wizards could fight them, thus, said other wizards had to be supported. That included him. 

Judith Albrecht, Mom, threw herself into Jürgen’s arms and cried. That was all she could do, and Konrad leaned in and hugged them both. “Ich liebe euch beide.”

* * *

After Christmas and before the start of term, there was another trip Konrad had to make. He wasn’t able to apparate to Cuba, it was simply too far. So instead, he boarded a British Airways flight to Havana using his German passport, and after a stop at Heathrow and then Madrid, he was on the tarmac in Havana. The illegal sanctions put in place by the US didn’t bind Britain at all, so there were tourist flights.

Once Konrad was in Cuba, he didn’t go through customs. His carry-on luggage had his usual extension charm, so he didn’t even need to go to baggage claim. Instead, he hung around until foot traffic died down enough, then he walked into the men’s bathroom, into a toilet stall, and apparated. 

Ernst Thälmann Island was a gorgeous tropical island, fifteen kilometers long and five-hundred meters wide, and where Konrad apparated was a huge stone bust of the titular head of the KPD during the Weimar years. Konrad purposefully walked through it, and found himself in a somewhat different place, a bit like Kings Cross Station, or Diagon Ally. It was a place, hidden within another place. 

Other wizards, most of them German though some Cuban walked around streets 'paved' in wooden planks, and moved in and out of buildings that were also constructed mostly from wood and set up on high stilts to protect from hurricane storm surge. He spotted a sign right above the street he was on that read “Willkommen in der Deutschen Zauberer Demokratischen Republik”, and there were a few Zauberervolkspolizei guarding the pathway and checking documents. Not that there were many people entering the rump of a country along with him. He walked toward them and they moved to intercept. 

“Guten Tag.” Konrad said. “Konrad Albrecht. Ich bin hier, um Marius Levine im Sanatorium zu besuchen.” he presented his documents, and his wand. 

“Guten tag, und willkommen.” The officer replied, examining his bona fides. “Die Sanitarium dreihundert Meter auf diese Weise.” He pointed toward the northeast. 

“Danke.” Konrad thanked him and started walking. He did bump into a few of his old comrades who’d managed this particular escape and made pleasant conversation, but he excused himself each time. He went through three cigarettes as he walked those five hundred meters, then he saw the red cross that indicated the sanitarium. He walked up the stairs to the balcony and tapped the cigarette out in the ashtray by the door, then walked inside. It was much larger and much nicer on the inside than the outside. They had climate control, for one thing. Outside it was thirty something degrees Celsius with extremely high humidity. Inside, it was dry, and the temperature was in the low twenties. 

There was a secretary on duty just inside who Konrad approached. “Hallo, Marius Levine?” He asked. 

“Guten Tag, Zimmer zweiundzwanzig.” Was the curt reply. 

“Danke.” Konrad replied, and went in search of the room. At least the sanitarium had a sensible layout, nice and grid-like. Marius was in the second room on the second floor. So Konrad went up the stairs and found the room. It wasn’t locked, this wasn’t that kind of place. He walked inside and what he found there…

It was Marius, tucked into a comfortable looking bed in a room that looked like a somewhat spartan single-room flat, but it was clear nothing but the bed was ever used. Marius stared up at the ceiling, blinking occasionally but otherwise not responsive to the world. 

“Can I help you?” Someone asked behind him in a Spanish accent. Konrad turned around and saw an olive-skinned wizard in doctor's robes, emblazoned with the Asclepius. He looked like he was in his late thirties and had a very kind facial affect “I am doctor Hernandez, and you would be?”

“Konrad Albrecht, Marius’ boyfriend.” Konrad replied, and the doctor’s eyes brightened a few shades. 

“Ah, a pleasure to meet you! I am glad you could finally make it to our little paradise, such as it is. We got your letter, he’s had it read to him. You should probably send more… they do help.”

“I figured, and I will. It just… knowing he can’t necessarily understand…” Konrad replied, trying not to cry and mostly succeeding. Seeing him like that.

“That is where you are wrong. The enchantment you placed on it, so that when we read it, he heard it in your voice? His heart rate climbed. He’s not comatose, just hiding.”

“Wait, what?” Konrad was struck dumb. 

“Si. Cruciatus Catatonia. His conscious mind basically ran and hid from the pain. He might recover, he might not, I’d give it fifty fifty odds normally, but if he has a reason to come back? A good positive reason? His chances improve substantially. You basically have to coax him to come out again, but he’s in there somewhere.”

Konrad’s heart soared to hear that. Absolutely over the moon. “What do you need me to do?”

“For now? Stay here as long as you can, talk to him, hold him, take him out to the beach and let him see the sunrises and sunsets with you. Write often, and visit as much as you can.”

“That last part isn’t easy… I’m back at school in Britain, and trying to fight off an undead Dark Wizard…”

Doctor Hernandez stared at him for a second. “You don’t know when to quit do you? Easy to say for me I guess, we won our revolution and managed to keep the capitalists out afterward. Hmm. I’ll tell you what? I’ll have a set of port-keys made for you. That way, when you can slip away for a few hours or days, you’ll get in right here, past the guards and wards .”

“And the Atlantic…” Konrad added. 

“Hah! Si. A bit far for brooms or apparating.” Dr. Hernandez certainly had a cheerful disposition. 

“Thank you Doctor but um… can we have some privacy?”

“Si, of course. I’ll leave you alone.” Dr. Hernandez politely left and shut the door behind him. Konrad didn’t waste any time. The bed was large enough, so he crawled into it and cradled Marius in his arms.. 

“Ich bin hier mein Schatz. Ich liebe dich, alles wird gut. Ich verspreche.” Then he started singing an arbeiterlieder, their arbeiterlieder.

“Brüder seht die rote Fahne, weht Euch kühn voran.

Um der Freiheit heil'ges Banner, schart Euch Mann für Mann.

Haltet stand, wenn Feinde drohen, schaut das Morgenrot.

Vorwärts ist die große Losung, Freiheit oder Tod.” 

Marius was rail thin, to the point of being gaunt. Lack of exercise had atrophied his muscles, and it felt so odd to Konrad to be both the big spoon, and to not feel his partner’s solidity, but that just made him want to hold and do everything he could to protect and help the man he loved. He deserved better than to spend the rest of his life like this. 

The room did have a window, and it was edging into early evening. The sun was about to set and they were close enough to the western beach that Konrad thought they should be able to make it in time.

He finished the song, and kissed Marius’ scalp through his hair. At least they were keeping him clean shaven with a close crop as Marius liked. Konrad had a bit of a stubble which he realized he probably needed to deal with. Then with a bit of maneuvering, he picked Marius up. He didn’t weigh much more than a child, but it wasn’t easy because he was dead weight, and he had to take care that Marius’ head didn’t flop back dangerously. He couldn't support his own head. 

Then he trudged down the stairs and out of the building, and then made it across the forty meters to the beach. The sun was just starting to caress the horizon. He negotiated setting himself down with his legs outstretched, supporting Marius’ back against his chest and cradling him in his arms, holding both of his hands. It definitely took some effort, but it worked. They were both able to watch the sunset with maximum body contact. As the sun dropped lower and lower and the colors became more brilliant, Konrad kept talking. 

“Es ist sehr schön, nicht wahr, Liebhaber?” He asked. Then he had an idea. “Kannst du antworten? Ich weiß, dass du da drin bist.” He kissed the side of Marius head and nuzzled into his neck. “Vielleicht meine Hand drücken?”. Nothing, no hand squeeze. “Nein? Okay. Vielleicht kannst du dein Blinken kontrollieren? Nichts für nein, zwei Blinzeln für ja?” It took a second, but there were two blinks in rapid succession that Konrad could see out of the corner of his own eye. He flexed his arms just enough to register as a squeeze but not enough to do any harm to someone who was so very thin. “Ausgezeichnet! Gut gemacht!” Konrad decided to push his luck and try for morse code. “Kannst du Morsecode machen?” After a long pause, nothing. Or not nothing, but a few disordered blinks. “Es ist okay mein Schatz. Du machst das sehr gut. Binär ist es.” 

Konrad could settle for binary.

* * *

On the train back to Hogwarts, Konrad managed to find the booth that Harry, Ron, and Hermione liked to occupy.

“Hallo!” He greeted them.

“Hey mate.” Ron greeted him first, followed by Hermione and Harry, who scooted over to give him room in the seat. 

“You seem… happier than usual.” Harry must have noticed the change in voice tone. 

“Yeah mate, did you meet a girl or something?” Ron asked. To which Harry and Konrad both laughed. 

“What’d I say? What’s so funny?” Ron was terribly confused. 

“I see you did not tell them Harry…” Konrad noted.

“Tell us what? What are you going on about?” Ron didn’t understand at all, but Hermione got it. Konrad watched the realization dawn on her. 

“He’s gay, Ron. And Harry has known for…?”

“Just before the holidays.” Harry clarified for her. 

“Oh!” Ron at least understood the concept. “Never met one of those, er, one of you, whatever.” A bit awkward. “So, you meet a nice boy then?”

“Nein. Well, after a fashion.” Konrad decided to be a bit coy even though he was grinning from ear to ear and certainly felt comfortable enough with these three to talk about it. 

“Is Marius recovering?” Harry asked.

“A little. He’s got Cruciatus Catatonia… basically Locked-In-Syndrome. He’s managing to communicate in eye-blinks, but only in binary.”

“That’s great! Well, not that he has that, but that he can communicate.”Hermione said

“Ja.” Konrad replied, beaming.

“Wait a minute, I feel like there’s some background we’re missing. You’ve been holding out on us, a lot, I think.” Ron said, it wasn’t accusative, just curious.

“Ja and I’m sorry. It’s hard to talk about.” But he did tell them. He told them everything. How they resisted after their headmaster was murdered, how they were driven from school and ended up captured while patrolling the perimeter around their partisan camp and taken back to school and tortured for information on the location of the others. How he’d been mock-executed to force Marius to talk, and when that didn’t work… the Cruciatus Curse was used repeatedly, over and over again. Then the breakout. Their comrades assaulted the school to bust them out. Then the evacuation, getting Marius to safety on Ernst Thälmann Island with elements of the government, the Zauberervolksarmee and Zauberervolkspolizei, while he had to evacuate his parents to the UK. The full explanation took up most of the trip, and at the end of it, no one knew what to say really. Except for Ron.

“Well that explains why you’re so screwed up, mate…” It actually let Konrad laugh.

* * *

With the start of the spring term, Konrad spent more time teaching than he did actually studying. First he would teach Harry the gaps in his own education and then help Harry teach the classes to the Community Defense Committee. But he didn’t mind. Combat magic covered all the core subjects, from charms to some particularly nasty transmutations. Most wizards contented themselves with turning chairs into tea kettles for some very british reason. Konrad was teaching fourth and fifty and in some cases sixth and seventh year students how to transmute the air into various poisonous gases. 

But today, was small unit tactics, and he had a special spell to teach them. 

“Guten tag klasse!” He greeted everyone in the amphitheater. “Today we will be learning a spell of my own design. Harry does not know this one yet.” He winked over at Harry who grinned and kept an eye on him. “Shield charms, unless they are worked into a fixed location like the wards surrounding this very castle, tend to only protect you. But what if I told you that you could defend areas, or a small squad of other wizards?”

He swept his wand out in front of him and spat out the incantation 

“Scutum negata!” 

A shimmering wall of blueish mostly transparent energy appeared before him while he continued to feather his wand from side to side, but it didn’t just cover his body. It was five meters across. The crowd of students let out a collective ‘ooooo’.

“This is why you pay attention in Arithmancy!” Hermione noted for everyone but then paused “In fact this is why you take Arithmancy!” The class laughed, though not at her this time, but mostly at themselves because Arithmancy was a very difficult and thus particularly unpopular class. 

“So long as you keep feathering your wand back and forth at a regular interval, this spell will persist, and move with you, facing in whatever direction you point your wand. The trick is to keep your wand movements even and regular, like the motion of a pendulum. You might need to practice by keeping yourself in time with a metronome. It is however not invincible, enough magical energy and it’s matrix will be disrupted, and it won’t block unforgiveables.” Konrad said. “Now, I want you to try and hit me. Give me your worst.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was mid-March when Konrad got the news. When joined the others for breakfast, everyone had a copy of the Prophet because all other papers had been banned. Ten prisoners, Deatheaters every last one of them, had escaped from Azkaban Prison. Of course the Ministry had pinned it on Sirius Black, ostensibly freeing his cousin Bellatrix LeStrange, but he knew that wasn’t true. There was a massive hole in the structure of the prison itself, the Dementors didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop the breakout. Which given Harry’s experience before the start of the school year, was somewhat telling. The dementors had defected, but Konrad kept that to himself. And Neville looked like he was ready to commit murder.

“Dumbledore warned Fudge this would happen.” Hermione complained. “But he’s going to get us all killed because he can’t face the truth.”

That conversation got interrupted by Seamus Finnigan. “Harry?” The ambient noise in the room stopped as Seamus stood up. “I uh… I wanted to apologize. Now even me mum says the Prophet’s version of things doesn’t add up. So what I’m really trying to say is that… I believe you.”

“Thank you, Seamus. That means a lot. It really does.” Harry replied graciously, and the tension in the room immediately lifted. 

* * *

“Make it a powerful memory. The happiest you can remember.” Harry was instructing everyone on how to cast a Patronus charm. “Allow it to fill you up! Keep trying Seamus!” Seamus had joined them after the prison break, and couldn’t seem to get the spell off. All around people were managing to get the spell off, but it was one that always gave Konrad trouble. “A full-bodied patronus is the most difficult to produce, but shield forms can be useful against a wide variety of opponents.” Ginny Weasley managed to produce one, in the form of a horse. “Fantastic Ginny! But remember your patronus can only protect you for as long as you stay focused so focus, Luna!” It was hilariously pointed, as scatter-brained as she often was. Hers ended up being a hare.

But Konrad wasn’t having much luck with it. Not at all. He got wand sparks and that was it. 

“What memory are you using Konrad?” Harry sidled up to him and asked, without projecting to the class. 

“Marius and my first kiss at Lake Baikal… It used to work, at least for a shield form.” 

Harry gave him an appraising look. “Hmm. It could be that it’s complicated by other things. Try something more recent.”

Which, to Konrad’s mind, was a very solid suggestion. So he thought of that first pair of eye-blinks that let him know that Marius might actually recover, that he was still in there and could communicate with the outside world. He let the memory fill up every bit of his mind, recalled the way his heartbeat quickened and how unspeakably happy he was in that tiny little moment “Expecto Patronum.”

And there it was. A silver-blue light that materialized into a trundling snuffly badger that shuffled through the space in front of him wagging it’s little butt like a dog with a cropped tail. 

“Good job Konrad.” Harry clapped him on the shoulder and moved on, encouraging the rest of the class until most people had gotten at least a shield form patronus.

Which was when everyone heard a rumbling sound that came through the walls and everyone stopped. More thudding, then more. 

“They’re trying to break down the wall. Harry get everyone out, and scatter. I’ll hold them off. Go!” Konrad meant it as an order, even though he didn’t have that kind of authority his sheer presence as he put himself between everyone else and the wall that was starting to crack did the job.

“Alright everyone, out the escape hatch let’s go. Move move!” Everyone, including Harry, Ron, and Hermione bolted for the back of the room which would let them out at a random location within the castle. 

This was almost Konrad’s worst-case scenario, and he had a contingency for it. Or at least, he came up with one on the spot given what he could do with the corporeal patronus. “Expecto Patronum” The little badger waited, as the wall cracked further under tremendous strain. Konrad imparted his message, a warning to Dumbledore that Konrad was going to throw him under the trolley car to save the rest of the students; and then it trundled up into the air and through the ceiling. 

Konrad readied himself. The wall was hit again, and a stone fell out of place. Through the crack he could see Umbridge. She looked incredibly smug as she pointed her wand at the wall. 

“Bombarda Maxima.” 

She said it slowly, almost languid, like she was taking an extra special joy in what she was doing. Konrad had a pretty good idea that if she could cast a patronus charm, what her mental happy place was. 

But the wall finally collapsed inward toward Konrad in a shower of broken sandstone and granite. The walls of Hogwarts were not shoddily constructed. He protected himself from injury with a simple shield charm. 

There she was, in the same pink outfit she was always in. A few members of her inquisitorial squad including Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle, plus Pansy Parkinson and a few others he didn’t recognize were flanking her. Draco himself held Cho Chang at wand point. It was always the weakness to the Fidelius charm. Nothing could be said or put to paper, but nothing stopped her from walking. But she couldn’t tell anyone who the other members were, or what it was they were doing, exactly. 

“Welcome to my fortress of solitude.” Konrad said, mockingly. He couldn’t win. He knew that. And at this point if he actually fought back and struck anyone with magic he would almost certainly be expelled. But he didn’t have to win, he didn’t have to hit anyone. All he had to do was frustrate and delay. 

“Get him.” Umbridge commanded. 

“Scutum negata!” He extended the shield and simply blocked the hole in the wall. Draco was already in the process of trying to get through when it went up, and he simply bounced off like he’d run into a door. Konrad kept feathering his wand back and forth maintaining the spell. 

It was hit repeatedly. The inquisitorial goons hit it with everything they had. Shield-breakers, blasting hexes, eventually Umbridge joined in and it was her Bombardment hex that finally broke the shield. It sublimated into nothing and the goons came through. But Konrad judged the others had enough time to pretend like nothing had ever happened. So he holstered his wand, and put up his hands.

The last thing he remembered before waking up in Umbridge’s office was Draco Malfoy’s stunning jinx.

* * *

When he did wake up, he was tried down in a chair in that disgustingly pink kitten-strewn office. He managed to croak out a derisive quip.

“This is starting to become like a second home to me Inquisitor. I should come by for tea more often.”

“Tee hee” Umbridge laughed that too-sweet-to-be-real twitter she liked to do. “I’m afraid we won’t be having tea today Mr. Albrecht. I’ve figured out what you are. You used the Fidelius Charm, you’re a Secret Keeper, so I know that veritaserum won’t work.” Which answered that question. He didn’t know if it could or if it was the occlumency. Evidently, it was the Fidelius. Which gave him an idea if he could pull it off. “Ms. Chang was quite cooperative, and the contents of that room.” She tisked at him. “So tell me, Mr. Albrecht, who else was in there with you? That troublesome Potter? That filthy little Mudblood, Granger? The Weasleys?” She practically scoffed the last name. 

“Leck meinen Arsch.” Was all he said, and it was close enough to the English via cognates that she understood, and slapped him across the face hard enough that it whipped his head around. 

“Disgusting Mudblood. You couldn’t have organized all that on your own. Was it Dumbledore?” Konrad said nothing. Completely stone-faced. “No matter. We’ll just have to find the gaps in the Fidelius Charm. There are always gaps…” She giggled again. “But I don’t really have time to find them the old fashioned way.”

Konrad braced himself mentally. He was about to try something he’d never managed before, but if he could do it… Umbridge pointed her wand at him. “Legilimens.” He pulled up memories he wanted her to see, a half-truth. 

He was in Dumbledore’s office, speaking to Dumbledore, who had his back turned. The image he was using was absolutely accurate, it was his memory of that night when Harry had his mind invaded by Voldemort, but the rest was a confabulation. 

_“You seem like you have a suitable disposition, Mr. Albrecht. The Defense Against the Dark Arts Club needs to be ready to become more than that. Do you understand?”_

_“I do Headmaster. If the Dark Lord has returned, we have to be ready to move if he infiltrates the government.” Konrad fabricated his own reply in his head._

_“But use only those who are personally loyal to me, no one else can be trusted.” The phantom headmaster clarified._

That wasn’t exactly what Umbridge wanted, but it was what she needed, and she terminated the spell. 

* * *

It wasn’t long at all before she’d summoned the minister and several Aurors. One of the ministerial officials who had red hair and freckles had dragged Harry away from wherever he’d been hiding and hauled him into the chamber alongside Kingsley Shacklebolt holding Konrad at wand-point. He’d at least introduced himself. It was strangely polite.

“I’ve been watching them for weeks! And it’s plain as day! Mr. Albrecht’s countermeasures don’t give me as much hard proof as I want, but his memories prove that Dumbledore recruited him to subvert the student body into an army at Dumbledore’s command! He was preparing for a move on the Ministry, Cornelius!” She turned to Harry and Konrad. “All your fear-mongering about You Know Who never fooled me for a minute!” Then she directed her ire toward Dumbledore “We saw your lies for what they were! A bid to seize control of the Ministry!”

“Naturally.” Dumbledore replied. 

“No! Professor! He had nothing to do with it, it was us!” Harry tried to confess, but he would be no more able to give details than Cho had been. And he didn’t know what misdirection Konrad had used. Harry caught his eyes, looking for backup, and Konrad winked. 

“Most noble of you Harry to shield me, but as has been clearly pointed out; the jig is up. They took it from Konrad’s memories and they found the training room.” Dumbledore turned toward the minister. “I instructed Konrad to form their Community Defense Committee on my authority as headmaster, with the intention of subverting it against the Ministry without their prior knowledge. I, and I alone, am implicated. A conspiracy of one, if you will.”

“Dispatch an owl to the Daily Prophet if we hurry we should make the morning edition.” Minister Fudge ordered. “Dawlish, Shacklebolt, you will escort Dumbledore to Azkaban, where he will await trial on charges of Conspiracy and Sedition.”

Dumbledore stood more upright, and had his wand out. “Ah, I thought we might hit this little snag. You seem to be laboring under the delusion that I’m going to...what is the phrase? Come quietly? Well I can tell you this: I have no intention of going to Azkaban.”

In a rage that was completely pure, Umbridge shouted “Enough of this! Take him!” 

The aurors started to move toward the ancient wizard, but before they could act a phoenix appeared in the window and touched Dumbledore, who disappeared in a massive gout of magical flames, leaving no trace whatever, and knocking everyone present backwards onto their asses.

When they pulled themselves up off the floor, Shacklebolt finally said something. “Woah… Well, you may not like him Minister, but you have to admit, Dumbledore has style…”

“What about these two?” Umbridge pointed her fingers at Harry and Konrad. “They should be made to answer for their crimes.”

“You heard it from Dumbledore himself. They didn’t know. They’re not implicated, just his patsies. There’s no reason to prosecute them.” Shacklebolt replied. “And with the organization broken up, there’s no threat of it being subverted.” Minister Fudge looked like he was about to disagree. “Minister, it wouldn’t look good to expel and prosecute schoolboys. They were tricked by their wily headmaster, leave it at that.”

“Very well.” Minister Fudge replied. “Let them go.”

Konrad thanked his lucky stars, and Shacklebolt winked at him and Harry when the other adults couldn’t see. Konrad understood. He was with them. 

* * *

Nothing, however, could stop Umbridge from officially becoming Headmaster of Hogwarts. The notice was posted the next day, along with the daily announcements over the speaker system.

_“Boys and girls are not permitted to be within eight inches of each other. Any student who wishes to join the inquisitorial squad for extra credit, please report to the headmaster’s office. All students must submit to questioning about potential illicit activities. Any student found not in compliance will be expelled.”_

Her first act was to inflict her particular version of ‘detention’ on every suspected member of the CDC. So once again, Konrad found himself at a writing desk, this time in the main hall with everyone he’d ever taught, plus a few extras who’d never joined, including Sarah. Judged guilty by her mere association with him and Luna Lovegood. 

Umbridge stood up from her throne on the dias, where the staff would normally eat during great feasts. “Ah-hem” She cleared her throat to get attention. “You are going to write some lines for me today. Two hundred repetitions of whatever it is on your desks.” For Konrad it was _‘Naughty children deserve to be punished.’_ “ Failure to comply will result in expulsion.” Then she sat bad down.

Everyone started to write, and with each repetition, the chorus of pain grew louder. It didn’t take very long before Sarah was bawling, and there was nothing Konrad could do about it. He wrote his lines, glaring daggers at Umbridge even as his hand burned with every pen stroke. He watched as Umbridge revelled in the suffering she was inflicting, getting off on it. He finished early, and pretended to keep writing so he could be there when Sarah finished. She eventually did, eventually because she was all of twelve years old now and had never experienced or had to deal with that kind of pain, so each pen stroke was agonizing and terrifying for her. She set the quill down and raised her hand, covered in blood. Konrad instantly did the same. Umbridge got up again, because several students had already been dismissed, and checked over both of them. In fact, everyone dropped their quills at that point, and Umbridge had to check them all, counting every line of blood-red text. No one wanted to leave someone else behind, was the message Konrad got from that, and it gave him no small amount of pride.

When all of them had been checked, Umbridge grinned “You’re all dismissed.” Konrad didn’t waste a second, he was already out of his seat before the word ‘dismissed’ was done echoing through the great hall. He scooped Sarah up and got her out of there as fast as he could. He didn’t care that her tears covered his shoulder and her blood was soaking his neckline, just got her out. 

Cho Chang was waiting outside, looking mortified, but Konrad went right past her and got Sarah to a bench, down the hall and somewhere safe. 

He sat down with her on the stone bench and didn’t care if he was technically violating the rules, those were about public displays of affection, this was about comforting a child. 

“It’s okay little Schmetterling. It’s alright. I’ve got you…” He held her with one hand, and drew his wand with the other. He tapped her hand and spoke an incantation for a simple healing spell he knew, though he had no idea if it would work at all. 

“Episkey.” 

The wound, being magically inflicted, didn’t heal necessarily, but the bleeding did stop and so did at least some of the pain, because Sarah’s sobs died down to whimpers. Konrad went ahead and cast the same spell on himself. No need to drip blood everywhere. The pain faded from a hot-poker stab to a dull ache.

“I’m sorry Harry, I’m so sorry!” It was Cho’s voice, from down the hall, echoing across the stone. 

“Yeah well, I don’t accept your apology.” He replied coldly. 

“She threatened my mum!” Cho tried to explain.

“And now she’s torturing first years, whose fault is that? Oh right, yours. Because you found your way around a Fidelius Charm and led her straight to us. Sod off.”

“Shh. Don’t pay any mind to that.” Konrad told Sarah. “I promise it will be better soon.” And he meant it, because in that moment, he resolved that when he was done with her, as soon as he could do in the clear, Dolores Umbridge’s days of taking pleasure in the suffering of children would come to a very permanent end. 

After a moment, Sarah released her grip and that prompted Konrad to release his and let her feet slip to the floor. “Are you okay?” She asked.

“Ja, I’m okay. I’ve faced worse, I’ll make it.” Konrad replied. “You still taking your potions?”

Sarah nodded “The other Professors kept it a secret from Umbridge.” She paused. “Even Snape. But…” She showed him the special message she’d been forced to scrawl onto her own skin. _‘I am a boy.’_ It made Konrad’s blood boil, but he kept that bottled up and kissed Sarah’s forehead. He improved his internal estimate of Professor Severus Snape, though.

“Pay that… that… Nasty Person no mind.” He told her. 

“What was that you called me a minute ago? Schmetterling? What does it mean?” She asked.

“Butterfly, in German.” Konrad said matter-of-fact. She managed a giggle. 

“That’s appropriate…” She noted with a weak grin. “I should get going Konrad, I… I still have homework to do and there’s hot chocolate in the Hufflepuff common room. That helps, but only if its still hot when I get there.”

“Chocolate always helps. Go on, I need to talk to Harry Potter, we’ll catch up later okay?”

“Okay.” She gave him another hug, and a kiss on the cheek, and he returned both; then she ran off in the direction of the dormitories. 

“Who was that?” Harry asked.

“A little girl I know and have come to care about.” Konrad replied. “But there is something. The Episkey charm works. It dulls the pain and stops the bleeding.”

Harry looked… some kind of way. Defeated, maybe? “Walk with me Konrad, I don’t want to talk about anything in these halls.” Which was something Konrad thought was reasonable. They did walk, in silence, until they met up with Ron and Hermione, and then went out to the bridge to the Astronomy tower, walking until they were almost inside the threshold before Ron broke the silence. 

“You did everything you could. No one can win against that old hag…” Then Ron paused. “Why haven’t you used the surveillance audio yet Konrad? The minister was right there.”

“Because I want the minister too.” Konrad replied. “Though I am regretting that decision now.”

“Either way, it isn’t either of your fault. You did everything you could.” Hermione added, trying to comfort them both. “Even Dumbledore didn’t see this coming. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s ours. All three of us.” Konrad had to give her that, and he nodded. 

“Yeah, we talked you into it.” Ron added. 

“Yes, but I agreed.” Harry replied. “I tried so hard to help, and all I did is make things worse.” Harry turned away from them all and stared off into the foggy mist surrounding the school. “Anyway it doesn’t matter anymore. “Because I don’t want to play anymore, all that does is make you care too much, and the more you care the more you have to lose. So maybe it’s just better to…” He trailed off.

“To what?” Hermione asked. 

Harry turned back around to face them. “To go it alone.”

“That’s a bad idea Harry... “ Konrad finally spoke up. “Isolated, we’re vulnerable, we’re all vulnerable. Together, we stand a chance.”

“How has that turned out, Konrad?” He wasn’t shouting, but it was pointed. “You’re covered in a mix of your own blood, and the blood of a first year who wasn’t part of any of this. As near as I can tell, she was tortured simply because she’d been seen spending time with you.” He paused “Why was that, anyway?”

“Helping her with a medical condition. The staff is fully aware.” Konrad replied. “But you don’t know if this actually is worse. She could have never gotten anything she wanted and become slowly unhinged. You could have not had a constructive outlet for the rage that I _know_ burns inside, done something truly stupid, and then we’d all be up a creek. You’re not to blame for any of this. She is, the Ministry is, and ultimately Voldemort is.”

“Psst” Everyone turned. There was an inhumanly large bearded man whom Konrad had never seen before lurking between the columns, clinging to the side off the bridge and still managing to look for all the world like he’d been summoned to the headmaster’s office. 

“Hagrid?” Harry asked. The big man appeared hesitant to speak and Harry must have noticed it too. “It’s okay Hagrid, he’s trustworthy.”

It was clearly personal. “It’s okay Harry. I was going to go and take an evening trip to…” he coughed. “You go on ahead, I’ll see you tonight.”

“Alright.” Harry replied.

* * *

One evening, Harry came back from his occlumency lessons with Snape and found Konrad perched on the balcony, smoking a cigarette like he usually did before bed. Konrad noticed the door open and turned. Harry looked exhausted and shaken.

“Harry, you look like shit…” Konrad noted.

“Yeah. At least now I know why Snape hates me.” Harry said. Konrad raised an eyebrow. 

“He likes to wear me down. I can keep him out for a while, but hours and hours? Then he lays into me for being weak willed and eventually I just got sick of it. Deflected the spell back at him.” Harry was pacing back and forth, angrily. 

“Oh no.” Konrad produced the bottle of schnapps from his pocket and handed to Harry who took a not-inconsiderable gulp of the stuff before handing it back. Konrad didn’t want to make the boy an alcoholic, but still. He replaced the bottle back into his extension-charmed jacket pocket.

“Turns out my dad liked to bully him in school, and he takes it out on me because I look like him.” Harry shrugged “Of course my doing that ends the lessons, I think permanently.” He paused. “I don’t get it! Everyone says my father was a great man, and a wonderful person. I never knew him but then I see that! I don’t know what to believe anymore. Is everyone just having me on because I’m an orphan and no one but Snape wants to speak ill of the dead?”

“People grow and change, Harry. Your father might have been a shit, at school, but matured into the person everyone remembers. None of his friends, like Sirius, really want to talk about that time because they’re embarrassed by it.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “But it looks like I’ll just be taking over the occlumency lessons fully from now on.”

“I think I’d prefer that.” Harry said. “I don’t think I ever thanked you. For what you did with Umbridge. I don’t know what it was but kept us from being expelled and I imagine it could have gone very badly for you. What did you do?”

“There’s no need, Harry.” Konrad replied, and finished off his cigarette. “She gave me just the motivation I needed to fully master occlumency.”

* * *

On the first day of Easter Break Hermione had them up at the crack of dawn. “So I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up study schedules for all three of you.” She passed them each a weekly calendar with times and everything laid out for which subjects each of them was to study and when. Konrad looked at her like she’d grown a second head.

“Hermione, I get these two, but me? Really?” 

“Well I can’t see your grades now can I? You zip off to Cuba whenever you get the chance, and I never see you studying. I just want to make sure you don’t have to repeat your fifth year again and you get the credentials you need.” At that, Konrad sighed. In her way, it was sweet. 

“Alright, alright. I’ll actually study.” He conceded. 

“You never know, they might come in useful.” Harry allowed, deferring to Hermione. “We do only have six weeks until the exams, we should probably buckle down. Some of the others have been studying all year.”

“Wait, only six weeks?” Ron asked, astonished. “Has it really gone that fast?” Hermione stared at him. 

“Time does exist, it does pass. It’s already Easter Break, and the exams are in late May. So yes, six weeks. How could you forget that?” She chided him, Ron groaned. 

“I don’t know. There’s been a lot going on, it must have slipped my mind.” It was Hermione’s turn to groan and roll her eyes. 

“Well there you are. If you follow that, you should be fine!” She beamed a fractional second later. “But we start now, so go get your textbooks.”

Harry and Ron grunted in annoyance and got up off the couch and went to fetch his books. Konrad didn’t bother. His schedule said Arithmancy so all he did was pull out his wand and wave it in the air. 

“Accio Arithmancy Textbook, Accio Study Supplies.” A few seconds later, his Arithmancy textbook, a laptop writing desk, spiral bound notebooks, and actual pens were all on his lap. He looked up at Hermione as he immediately started reviewing magical theory. “I do study Hermione, it’s just after you lot go to bed.”

* * *

Near the end of the break, which given all the studying hadn’t been much of a break at all, Fred and George approached the quartet in the Gryffindor common room while three of them poured over a series of pamphlets about prospective careers. 

“Harry.” George got his attention “Ginny caught up with us about something you said to her earlier this week, about getting in touch with Sirius?” That definitely piqued his interest. He hadn’t voiced that particular desire to Konrad at all, or even hinted at it.

“Are you two completely mad?” Hermione asked. “How is he supposed to do that with Umbridge monitoring all the fires and frisking all the owls?”

“Well.” Fred said. “You might have noticed that we’ve been unusually silent on the mayhem front this past week.”

“We says to ourselves.” George continued “Why disrupt leisure time? And with all the studying going on, disrupting that would be the last thing we want to do.” He gave Hermione a little nod, and she looked somewhat taken aback by the thoughtfulness of that. 

“But!” Fred carried on, because they were the kind of twins who finish sentences “Its back to business as usual tomorrow, and we reckon if we’re going to create a ruckus, we can make sure Harry has a diversion.”

“Okay, that follows, but how is Harry supposed to talk to Sirius?” Hermione asked. 

“Umbridge’s office!” Harry said. “She doesn’t need to monitor her own fireplace. I have a knife Serius gave me that should open even enchanted locks.” He looked over at Konrad. “Think that could work?”

Konrad thought it over. He could imagine a lot of deeply personal and necessary things he might need to talk to his godfather about. So it was worth the risk to keep Harry sane, he’d noticed the strain Harry was under. They all had. If nothing else, he needed an explanation regarding his father that was more than the speculation that Konrad had given him. “It… could work.” Konrad said. “It would need to be one hell of a diversion.”

The twins just beamed at him. It would be one hell of a diversion. “We’ll set it off just after class tomorrow, to cause the most disruption while students are in the corridors. In the East Wing, far from her office.” George replied. Which, because the Headmaster’s Office didn’t recognize her, was still her cat-infested professorial office. “That should give you oh, about twenty minutes I should think?”

* * *

The next day was the start of the summer term, and given that his name was at the top of the alphabet, Konrad had an appointment with Professor McGonagall to discuss career options. He was a German, and thus always punctual to such appointments, even if he would end up missing from his Charms class. He opened the door to find Professor McGonagall sitting at her desk, consternation written all over her face. When he closed the door behind him, he noticed the pink out of the corner of his eye, and almost whipped out his wand to turn Umbridge into a grease-spot in her chair. But he restrained the impulse. 

“Mr. Albrecht, please, sit down.” Professor McGonagall said in her usual stern grandmotherly tone. “I know your situation is a bit unusual, but this meeting is to discuss what career ideas have for when you are out of school, and thus what subjects you might wish to continue in your next two years.” She did give him the small courtesy of acknowledging that this was technically his seventh year of education, even if it was by omission. “Have you had any thoughts on what you might want to do after you leave Hogwarts?”

The first thing that came to mind for Konrad was that he wanted to be a professional revolutionary and help take back his home country, but he didn’t say that. In all honesty, he was having trouble concentrating with Umbridge behind him, scratching on a notepad with her quill. Instead, he went for the next best thing. The job that would let him destroy people like Umbridge. “Assuming I stay within the United Kingdom, I was considering joining your Auror office.”

“I will grant, with you, that is a rather large assumption.” Professor McGonagall said, and the little smirk on her face let him know she had some reasonable guess as to why. “But you’d need top grades for that.” She opened up a small dark leaflet from some recess in her desk, and passed it over to him. “They ask for a minimum of five N.E.W.T.S, and nothing under Exceeds Expectations grade. Then you would be required to undergo a series of character and aptitude tests.” It was sounding like boilerplate. Like this particular part of the talk she’d done so many times that she had it memorized. “It’s a difficult career path, they only take the best and I don’t think anyone has been taken on these past three years.”

Umbridge let out one of her little coughs, but McGonagall ignored it.

“You’ll want to know what subjects you should take I suppose?”

“Yes, I imagine… Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Potions, Charms…” he trailed off, because he wasn’t sure what the last one should be.

“Naturally, all of those are necessary-” She was interrupted again by a somewhat more audible cough from Umbridge. Professor McGonagall closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued when she opened them again. “The last one is free-floating. I see you are taking Ancient Runes in addition to Arithmancy and Herbology. Any of which would be good choices. I would give you advice on which professors require what grades for acceptance into their N.E.W.T.S classes, but looking over yours I am not especially concerned, because you were already in the East-German equivalents of all of those classes when you-” She was once again interrupted by Umbridge, who stage projected the cough this time. “Are you alright, Dolores? Do you by chance need a lozenge?”

“Oh no, I am quite alright Minerva.” Umbridge finally replied. “I was just wanting to see about making a small interruption?”

“I think you’ll find you can.” McGonagall replied curtly without looking at her. 

“Are you certain that Mr. Albrecht has the character necessary to become an auror?” She asked. 

Professor McGonagall did not respond, except to continue where she left off. Exactly where she left off, in point of fact. “left the country. Your grades right now are all outstanding, and you demonstrated a strong aptitude for combat magic this year.”

Umbridge interrupted again without the cough this time. “I must confess I am confused. How can you say that he has a strong aptitude for combat magic when he’s been achieving very poor exam results in my class since the start of the year?”

Professor McGonagall stared at her, and then spoke in calm even tones that were downright chilly. “I’ve personally watched him effortlessly thrash three of your little pets, Dolores; and he held you and half a dozen other wizards off using a spell he invented. I think that counts as an aptitude, wouldn’t you agree?”

Umbridge didn’t say anything after that, she just sat back in her chair and scribbled furiously.

“Do you have any questions or concerns, Mr. Albrecht?” Professor McGonagall asked. 

“Ja. What sort of character and aptitude tests do they administer?” Konrad asked. 

“How well you react under pressure, your perseverance and dedication; it’s a three year program of study after Hogwarts and they want to make sure you can take it.”

“Ach, ja. That follows logically. Thank you Professor. You have given me much to think about.”

“You are dismissed Mr. Albrecht. I regret that our meeting has been so rudely interrupted.”

“It’s alright Professor, not your fault. Take heart in the application of inductive reasoning to the Defense Against the Dark Arts post, Professor.” 

“What?” Umbridge asked, but McGonagall got it if the wink she gave Konrad was any indication. Both of them knew something that Umbridge didn’t, several somethings, but since 1960, no professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts had lasted more than a year. A curse was widely suspected, but never proven to the point of deductive fact, still, it was a trend that had held for more than thirty years. 

* * *

Unlike the fall term, Defense Against the Dark Arts was Konrad’s last class of the day, alongside Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Hermione was practically begging Harry to not break into Umbridge’s office, but Konrad knew that was a waste of breath on her part. 

“Harry, Dumbledore sacrificed himself to keep you in school, please don’t do this…” She said.

“Give it a rest Hermione, he can make up his own mind…” Ron replied for him, all in whispers so as not to alert Umbridge, who was staring daggers at both Harry and himself intermittently.

For his part, Konrad said nothing until class ended and everyone was leaving the classroom. “I’ll join you Harry. If Umbridge comes back early, I’ll provide sufficient distraction that you can do what you need to do.”

“Konrad! Not you too!” Hermione complained. 

“He’s going to do it, Hermione. He has to, it’s deeply personal and I can’t disclose why. I’ll make sure he doesn’t get caught. Do you trust me or don’t you?” 

Hermione stopped walking and considered. “I trust you. Go. The fireworks are starting.” Sure enough, a series of loud bangs rang through the corridors. Student’s were running toward them, naturally, and Umbridge emerged from the classroom with her wand out and ran toward the noise as well. 

Harry took off at a run, and Konrad followed behind, until Harry rounded a corner, and by the time Konrad caught up with him, he’d simply vanished. Konrad was forced to weave between running students, which was never an easy task. Actually with his smoker’s lungs any kind of long-distance running was a chore, and it was a large castle. By the time he got to Umbridge’s office, it was already open. He shut the door behind Harry, went down the hall an around a corner to the only approach to Umbridge’s office, and waited. 

It wasn’t quite fifteen minutes later that he saw the gaunt hobbling form of Mr. Filch who looked far too excited to be up to anything good. He rushed back, knocked on the door three times to warn Harry, and then got into position just around the corner. He checked to make sure no students or staff were around, and no, the halls in this part of the school were empty thanks to Fred and George. Konrad then leaned around the corner.

“Confundis.” He said, in low tones, and the spell lept from his wand and struck Mr. Filch, who stopped in his tracks.

“What? Where am I? Who am I and why am I here?” It wouldn’t last but a few minutes for Filch to regain his train of thought and sense of self, so Konrad ran back toward the office and pushed the door open. No one was there.

“Harry?” he queried the room. 

“I’m here.” Harry replied, and pushed his face out from what was apparently an invisibility cloak. 

“Sehr gut! Filch is on his way, I’ve slowed him down, but we need to go. Now.” Konrad said. “And we need to be seen at whatever mess the twins have created.”

With that, they ran down the hallways, fully visible this time. The loud bangs and everything else continued, because the twins set fireworks to pop off everywhere. They went to the entrance hall. Students were crowded around the entrance hall, some looked like they were covered in stink sap. Teachers and ghosts were also in the crowd, and the inquisitorial squad had Fred and George and wand-point looking particularly pleased with themselves. 

Umbridge stood just a few feet away and down a few stairs from Konrad and Harry, so close that Konrad was sorely tempted to simply murder her by the simple expedient of blasting her down the stairs, but he thought better of it. 

“So, you think it amusing to turn to school corridors into a swamp, do you?” She asked Fred and George, who looked like people who knew they were cornered. That was, until George replied. 

“Pretty amusing, yeah!” He didn’t show the slightest sign of fear. 

“You two.” Umbridge pointed down at them “Are going to learn just what happens to wrong-doers in my school, as soon as Mr. Filch gets back…” She clearly expected him back by now. Harry looked at Konrad, who gave him a faux-sheepish grin in return.

“You know, I don’t think we are.” Fred replied, then turned to his twin. “George, I think we’ve outgrown full-time education.”

“Yeah, I’ve been feeling that way myself. Time to test our talents in the real world, I recon.”

“Definitely!” Fred replied with a wicked grin all over his face. As drop-outs went, this was fairly spectacular. Before Umbridge could say a word, they raised their wands and summoned their brooms. There was a loud crack, and both Konrad and Harry had to duck to avoid the flying broomsticks, still trailing the chains Umbridge used to secure them inside her office. 

“We won’t be seeing you!” Fred called out, mounting his broomstick. 

“Yeah, don’t bother to keep in touch!” George mounted his own. Then called out to the surrounding gathering. “If anyone fancies buying a portable swamp as demonstrated upstairs, come to number ninety-three Diagon Alley, Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes! Our new premises, special discount to those Hogwarts students who promise to use them to get rid of this old bat.”

“Stop them!” Umbridge said, but it was too late. As the two twins rose into the air, Fred looked toward the poltergeist floating above the student body and shouted.

“Give her hell Peeves!” And the ghost, who had never taken an order from anyone really, saluted him. The twins fended off the scattered jinxes and hexes that came their way from the inquisitorial squad members, but soon they were out of range and moving too fast to hit, soaring off into a most glorious sunset.

* * *

The two twin’s final farewell quickly became a thing of legend, particularly because no one who bothered to do so knew how to remove the swamp in the east wing. Professors McGonagall or Flitwick probably could, but they were content to let Umbridge and Filch try their luck to no avail. 

Inspired by Fred and George, many many students tried to make Umbridge’s life a living hell. Dung bombs and stink pellets became so common that students took to using bubble head charms as gas masks, nifflers were released into Umbridge’s office on their eternal quest for shiny objects, the inquisitorial squad was constantly short on manpower due to capricious jinxes laying them up. Students staged sick-ins by way of skiving snack boxes that somehow got smuggled in or were left as gifts by the twins. To Konrad, the disruption was magical. It sparked joy deep in his soul. Something like this would never have worked in Germany, but with British school-children? Absolutely. 

But Peeves? Peeves was something else. And there was nothing Umbridge could do, Professor McGonagall even ignored him and gave him advice. 

It was a few days into that mess that Hermione finally sat down with Ron, Konrad, and Harry for a meeting on the balcony. Everyone was studying for their exams, though Konrad had a cigarette in his mouth like he did whenever he was outside, but had the courtesy to be down-wind..

“Harry, what did you need to talk to Sirius about?” She asked, and Harry sighed. 

“It was my dad. I found out that he liked to bully Snape when they were students here and-” Hermione didn’t mean to interrupt, but her mind went a mile a minute.

“And it hurt your feelings that he was like that and you wanted to know the truth?” She nodded.

“Seriously? Who feels sorry for Snape?” Ron asked. “He’s a git.”

“It’s complicated.” Harry replied “But he and Lupin explained that he grew out of it, that everyone is an idiot at fifteen…” Which was certainly true. Konrad knew he was an idiot at fifteen, and he was only seventeen - almost eighteen, now - he didn’t want to think of how stupid he’d know himself to be when he was thirty. 

“I suppose that makes sense. But how did you find out?” Hermione asked. 

“Right? I can’t imagine he volunteered that information.” Ron added.

“No, no he didn’t. I might have gotten a bit miffed and reflected his spell back at him.” Harry replied.

“Bugger me mate, I bet he didn’t like that!” Ron reached over and lightly punched Harry’s shoulder.

Harry chuckled “No, no he didn’t. He actually refused to teach me occlumency anymore.” 

“What!? Harry, you need to go apologize, you need those lessons!” Hermione was white in the face. “Otherwise you-know-who might be able to-”

“It’s covered, Hermione.” Konrad said, exhaling smoke off the railing. “I’ve been teaching him at night since before that little incident. He’s made good progress too, I might add.”

“Yeah, Konrad is better than Snape was.” Harry acknowledged. “A lot better.”

“Is that… Konrad is that how you tricked Umbridge?” Hermione asked, putting two and two together. “I didn’t think you’d mastered it well enough to do that.”

Konrad smiled. “Neither did I, but I let my hate flow through me.”

Harry and Hermione both laughed at the reference, but Ron didn’t and he knew he’d missed some kind of muggle reference.. 

“Okay, what’d I miss? I swear all you people raised by muggles…”

“Ron, come to my house, you’ll meet my parents, and we’ll watch Star Wars. Actually you’ll get to see a few things. The only good thing about capitalism is cheap consumer electronics.” Konrad replied. “In any case, I don’t think Voldemort is going to be able to read Harry’s mind at will anymore. My real concern is that the connection is two-way.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. “Snape only talked about it in terms of him influencing me.”

“Well…” Konrad sucked in some smoke and replied on the exhale. “It’s the vision you described. He didn’t send that to you, you invaded his mind without him realizing it. If he knows, he can use occlumency to give you misinformation.”

“So, if he realizes that I am using legilimency in my dreams, he can do what you did to Umbridge.” Harry realized. “And if he knew the whole time, he could have let me see something true to convince me that what I am getting is reliable.”

“Exactly. So the question then becomes, how do we respond the next time you have a Dark-Lord dream?”

“Well, obviously, we ignore it and assume everything he sends is false.” Hermione declared. 

“Do we?” Ron asked. “What if whatever he sends is so terrible, we can’t risk being wrong? We might have to respond, and do what we can to reduce the risk.” Everyone looked at Ron. “What? I’m not actually dumb you know, I play a good game of chess.”

“Ten points Gryffindor.” Konrad said, taking another pull from his smoke.

* * *

Weeks later, the exams were upon them. Ernest McMillan was rapidly going insane, Hannah Abbot was a complete basket case. There was also a booming black market in various concentration aids of dubious providence that Konrad wanted nothing to do with.

“As you can see,” McGonagall said. “your OWLS are spread over two weeks, with written exams in the mornings, and practical exams in the evenings. Astronomy practicals will be held at night.” She then proceed to caution them all against attempting to cheat. “Our new ‘Headmistress’ has asked us to inform you that cheating will be punished most harshly, because of course, the examination results will reflect on her new regime at the school.” The word Headmistress was uttered with particular contempt, and Regime was clearly intended with its full implication. She gave a tiny sigh and her nostrils flared. “Of course that is no reason to do poorly. Your futures are on the line.”

The morning of the first exam saw the anxiety reach a fever pitch. Konrad marveled at it, but wasn’t feeling it. He’d taken similar exams before, he’d studied for these ones, and after you fight a guerilla war in the halls of your own school, an examination just lost most of its pucker factor. Nine-thirty AM rolled around and they all filed into the great hall in individual desks, arranged in perfect rows and columns. An exam booklet sat at each desk, along with spare ink bottles, quills, and scrolls of parchment. 

Professors McGonagall and Flitwick were at the front of the room, and Minerva turned over an enormous hourglass once everyone was seated. 

“You may begin.” She said simply, and Konrad got to work. The first question wanted him to describe the incantation and wand movements for a levitation spell. He did so, complete with a simplified drawing, and moved on to the next question. The thing was, the test was longer than anyone could ever possibly finish. He imagined it was actually graded on a curve, with the amount you actually finished factoring into your final score. Still, he thought idly while describing the counterspell for hiccups that it was petty cruelty to deliberately give students a test they couldn’t finish.

Hermione tried to sooth her anxiety by going over the exam in detail afterward, but Ron put a stop to that. 

Later in the afternoon, the practical exam. Everyone trundled into a waiting room to wait for their names to be called, but it was alphabetical by last name and so Konrad was among the first who Professor Flitwick called.

“Professor Tofty is free Comrade.” Professor Flitwick said, using his unofficial nickname rather than his actual name, probably by accident. 

“Danke.” Konrad replied, and entered the indicated room. Inside he saw the oldest person he had ever seen, sitting behind a desk. 

“Albrecht is it” The ancient one wheezed. 

“Yes sir.” Konrad replied politely. 

“No need to be nervous… Now, if I could ask you to take this egg-cup and make it do some cartwheels for me.” Konrad did it. He also levitated a whine glass, and turned a rat orange. He knew it went well. The next day for transfigurations, he powered through the written portion of the exam, and in the practical portion, he didn’t have any trouble making an iguana disappear, or any of the other transfigurations he was asked to actually do. 

He was flabbergasted by some of the mistakes other students made. He’d seen a lot of them successfully perform those same spells, but then, hadn’t he messed up some of his back in his original fifth year due to pure anxiety? 

That seemed like a distant memory, and the fact that he could remember a time when an exam filled him with existential dread made him a bit sad. When Thursday rolled around, it was time for Defense Against the Dark Arts. Here, he was happy the exam was standardized, and not to be graded by Umbridge. He could get every question right and still fail had that been the case. But it was graded by functionaries in the Ministry.

He took a special pleasure, as he knew Harry did too, of producing every single counter-spell, shield-charm, and attack spell absolutely flawlessly, right in front of Umbridge who was watching the preceding with undisguised loathing. 

“Very well done!” Professor Tofty praised him after he successfully blocked a disarm with a shield charm. “That’s all for us unless…” Professor Tofty leaned forward. “Are you able to produce a Patronus Charm, for an extra point?”

“Ja. Fully corporeal.” He grinned at Umbridge, and demonstrated. “Expecto Patronum!” His little badger came out, and pranced around the room, he even had it dance a little jig in front of Umbridge’s face. Every professor who was in the chamber administering their own tests marveled at it. Professor Tofty wrung his hands in joy. “Excellent. You may go!”

He had Ancient Runes on Friday, along with Hermione, and when they entered the common room together, Ron leaned over the edge of the common room couch. “How were the runes?”

“I mistranslated Ewas, it means partnership. Got it confused with Eiwas, for defense.” Hermione responded. 

Konrad shrugged. “I did alright.”

“Please, Konrad, you’re allowed to brag. I saw what you can do with ancient runes.” Hermione poked at him.

“True, but honestly… all of you would do much better if you just relaxed. The anxiety causes most of your problems.” Konrad replied, and casually bumped Hermione with his shoulder. “Besides, they clearly grade on a massive curve.”

“What makes you think that?” Ron asked. “Honestly the written portions are too long to even finish.”

“That’s why.” Konrad replied. Ron’s eyes lit up like he got it. He wasn’t stupid, sometimes he just didn’t think things through. Except for chess, he was thrashing Harry and had him about three moves from checkmate.

“And one more thing. Someone put another niffler in Umbridge’s office. We just walked past there and she was shrieking her head off.”

“Good” All three boys replied in unison.

“Not if she thinks Hagrid is doing it, we don’t want him to get sacked, remember?” Hermione reminded them. 

“He’s teaching right now, it couldn’t have been him.” Ron replied and Hermione looked like she didn’t know whether to kiss him on the forehead like one would an idiot child, or slap him. 

“You are so naive, Ron.” She said after a second. “Do you really think Umbridge will wait for proof?” Then she trudged into the girls dorms and didn’t say much the rest of the weekend. 

Potions was far more pleasant without Snape, both in terms of the written and practical portions. Snape didn’t hate Konrad personally so he only had to deal with the guff he got for not being Slytherin, but still. Then Herbology. He had Arithmancy at a different time than Hermione owing to not also having Care and Feeding of Magical Creatures - magizoologist Konrad was not - and then Astronomy. He took the written portion separately from the others, but it was a combined practical. 

It was a great night for Stargazing, with not a single cloud in the sky. He set up his telescope and started filling in the star charts with every single star and planet they were observing. Hours passed, and as he was finishing the Orion, the castle doors opened with golden light and the shut again. He was almost finished at about that point when he heard a loud door-knock and the barking of a massive dog. The door to Hagrid’s hut on the other side of the grounds opened, six figures entered, and then the door closed. He tried to get back to work until a loud roar punctuated the night, the other students looked up now.

“Try and concentrate boys and girls.” Professor Tofty said. “Twenty minutes to go.” Then there was a loud bang, and he door to Hagrid’s door slammed open. The six figures that had entered were trying to subdue Hagrid by magic. There were screams and yells. Spells bounced off his skin. 

“Oh dear.” Professor Tofty muttered. “They’re interrupting an exam!”

“Be reasonable about this Hagrid!” A man yelled.

“Reasonable be damned!” The impossibly large man who had to be half-giant yelled back. “You’ll never take me like this Dawlish!”

It got well and truly violent when someone attacked Hagrid’s dog, and that someone was bodily thrown some thirty meters through the air to land on the grass with a thump everyone could hear. Konrad managed to look over his now finished exam, and set down his quill to devote his full observational faculties to the scene unfolding before him. 

“Look!” Parvati shouted, and the castle doors opened again. It was obviously McGonagall. No one else was that tall. She started sprinting toward the cabin. 

“Only sixteen minutes left you know…” Professor Tofty reminded them, but at that point no one was paying any attention. 

“How dare you!?” McGonagall shouted. “How dare you!? He’s done nothing to warrant this, this” No less than four stunning spells slammed into the old woman. They hit her so hard that she was thrown bodily through the air to land on her back, and from there, she didn’t move. Everyone gasped in sheer horror.

“Galloping Gargoyles!” Professor Tofty exclaimed, forgetting the exam entirely. “Not so much as a warning? Outrageous behavior.”

“Cowards! Ruddy Cowards!” Hagrid took two massive swipes at his attackers, and knocked them cold. Hagrid picked up fang’s limp form, and Hagrid bolted. Despite Umbridge’s orders, no one else wanted anything to do with that. 

When the exam was over five minutes later, the students rushed downstairs. Everyone was talking about what they’d just seen. 

“That nasty evil woman!” Hermione raged, barely able to form words she was so angry “Trying to sneak up on Hagrid in the middle of the night.”

“Probably trying to avoid a scene like with Trelawny” Ernest McMillan noted. “Why do you suppose the spells bounced off him?”

“He’s half-giant. Its the reason that bint wanted to get rid of him in the first place.” Hermione answered.

Konrad didn’t stick around for that talk. He liked Professor McGonagall. He had to make sure she was okay. Four stunners to the chest, plus the impact afterward, she wasn’t exactly young, that could conceivable kill her. Konrad knew that every second counted with trauma, he knew that in a way that the other students didn’t, couldn’t. They’d never seen it… he pushed those thoughts away from his mind and sprinted to get Madame Pomfrey. When he got to the infirmary, he burst in without any kind of preamble, lungs burning.

“Madame Pomfrey.” He panted. “Professor McGonagall. Four stunners. Chest.”

“What!?” The school’s healer demanded. 

“Umbridge.” He felt like he was going to vomit, but spat everything out anyway. “She brought in Aurors to either expel or arrest Professor Hagrid. McGonagall intervened and they assaulted her.”

“Let’s go! You’re my assistant for the night.” She gathered up a satchel full of supplies which gave Konrad just enough time to catch his breath a bit. Then she turned to Konrad “Do you know any healing spells?”

“A few, not many.” He replied, following her out the door. 

“Okay, you levitate, I’ll attend to her injuries. Do what I say, when I say, you got it?”

“Jawohl!” Konrad responded in the affirmative. 

“You need to quit smoking, by the way.” She commented as he followed her down the stairs. 

“Would if I could, ma’am.” He replied. When they got downstairs, the aurors were already carrying Professor McGonagall in. Bodily. She was bleeding from her mouth and nose, and her chest wasn’t shaped right.

“Levitate her boy!” Madam Pomfrey commanded, and Konrad used the levicorpus spell without using the incantation. The aurors raise eyebrows, but they let go of Minerva so Pomfrey could get to work. She put on a big set of goggles and looked the deputy headmistress over. “Four broken ribs, one of which punctured her lung, internal bleeding... Shame on all of you!” 

“What is he doing here!?” Umbridge demanded, pointing at Konrad.

“Helping like a good boy, get the hell out of my face while I work!” There was something about Madame Pomfrey that even Umbridge didn’t want to tangle with, and she backed down. “Make sure to keep her neck still boy, I haven’t checked it yet.” She continued her assessment. “Concussion, and a hairline fracture to the occipital bones, no vertebral fracture.” Then she started casting spells while they moved back toward the infirmary. The blood stopped seeping from Professor McGonagall’s nose and mouth. Her breathing looked like it got easier.

By the time they got back to the infirmary and had Minerva into a bed, Madame Pomfrey was injecting potions. Madame Pomfrey finally took a break.

“Thank you.” She told Konrad, who hadn’t left, but stood by the door, twitching with anxiety. “She’ll be alright, but I’ll have to have her moved to St. Mungos Hospital.”

“Thank you Madame Pomfrey.” Konrad said, relaxing more than a bit, he felt like a weight on his soul was lifted.

“She wouldn’t have been so easy to hit in broad daylight… Bastards. I’d resign in protest if not for the need to take care of the lot of you. Go, get to bed. You still have exams in the morning.”

“Will do, thank you, have a good night.” Konrad replied, and turned to leave. Madame Pomfrey called after him. 

“You too! And quit smoking!”

* * *

When Konrad got back to the common room, Harry and Hermione were waiting for him. He figured that Ron had already gone to bed. “Where have you been?” Hermione asked rather pointedly. Konrad plopped down on the floor next to the fire. It was just them. They didn’t care. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack, but Hermione winced. He paused.

“It’s been hours. I’m tired. And I just ran across the school and back. We can all go out to the balcony if you want, but the floo will pull the smoke up.” He waited with his zippo for some sort of response. He’d respect her wishes, but he really didn’t want to get back up.

“It’s true.” Harry replied. “It does work for that. And he’ll use cleaning charms to get the stink out, won’t you?” He asked.

“I sleep less than any of you, and I did all winter.” Konrad replied. Hermione gave him her assent with a nod. The lighter clicked and he inhaled foul tasting but also strangely pleasant dried carcinogenic plant, exhaling directly into the fireplace. “I ran to get Madame Pomfrey. Professor McGonagall was in a bad way.” He described the injuries. “She’ll have to go to St. Mungos. No idea how long she’ll be there.”

“I can’t believe they managed to hit her at all.” Harry said. “She was a dueling champion when she was younger.”

“It’s easier to hit someone when they’re not expecting an attack.” Hermione pointed out. “She didn’t even have her wand out.”

“Pretty much that, yes.” Konrad replied. “I ran to get help because… well I rather like her.” He was finally able to put a finger on why. “She reminds me of my old headmistress. And every second can count with traumatic injuries.”

“But she’ll be okay right?” Hermione asked. Konrad nodded. 

“Should be.”

* * *

Because everyone had History of Magic, that exam was split into blocks during the morning hours. He was, once again, in the earliest block, and thus was walking out when Harry, Ron, and Hermione walked in. So he decided to go and decompress by listening to his surveillance feed from Umbridge’s office, live. He hadn’t actually listened all year, just switched out the records as they became full. There was now a massive pile of them inside the pocket-dimension that was his rucksack, with copies in Professor McGonagall’s office. He entered the library and slid through the stacks until he found the set that the receiver was under. 

He sat down and put the headset on and listened. There wasn’t much going on for a while. Just Professor Umbridge humming to herself as she did something inane to the sound of hundreds of meowing cats. Konrad realized that he could never go to an animal shelter again without thinking of her, and that just made him want to kill her even harder. 

He zoned out, not paying any attention until there was a knock on the office door. That got Konrad’s attention. She chuckled the little one she made when she was annoyed, but Konrad heard her chair being shoved out from under the desk. “One moment.” she called out after the second knock, and then she walked across the office and opened the door. “Mr. Weasely, what is the meaning of this?” There was only one of those left, which meant that was Ron. 

“Headmistress.” Ron Said, panting, though Konrad could tell it wasn’t real. “It’s peeves, he’s causing a ruckus in the Transfigurations Department.”

“Oh we’ll just see about that! Umbridge said, and judging from the sound, she’d followed Ron out the door and closed it behind her. 

“Was in der Hölle?” Konrad muttered to himself. Ron had never cared about that sort of thing. He encouraged Peeves. But when the door opened a moment later, Konrad heard Hermione. 

“Hurry Harry. We don’t have much time.” She said, and Harry didn’t waste that time. He heard the fireplace erupt into flame and Harry shout the address for Grimmauld Place, which was evidently the Order’s hiding spot. 

Konrad was transfixed in horror. This was a hastily planned operation, and hastily planned operations tended to go disastrously wrong. Harry had to know that, which meant he was desperate, and acting stupidly. He couldn’t stop listening when the door opened, and he heard the sounds of a scuffle. Umbridge had returned and caught them. Along with their lookouts from the sounds of the other people being dragged into the room.

“This one.” It was Crabbe “Tried to stop us from taking her, so we brought him too.”

“Well, it seems that Hogwarts is about to become a Weasley-Free Zone now doesn’t it? So tell me Potter, who were you communicating with?” Umbridge asked. “Dumbledore? That filthy half-breed Hagrid? I doubt it was Minerva McGonagall, I hear she’s still too ill to talk to anyone.” It was a taunt. And Harry didn’t rise to it, even though she’d already thrown him against the desk. Several voices laughed. He recognized Draco Malfoy among them.

“It’s none of your business who I talk to.” Harry snarled.

“Very well. I’ve offered you the chance to speak freely, you’ve refused.” In her dangerously sweet tones. “I have no alternative but to force you. Draco? Fetch Professor Snape.” Draco, evidently, left the room and closed the door behind him. That was Konrad’s cue to leave. 

He put the headset down, and put the receiver back into its hiding place, then stood up again. He couldn’t run, he had to walk, otherwise it would be suspicious and he’d find himself confronting members of the inquisitorial squad. 

He did his best to blend in with crowds of students as they moved through the halls. However, it was late enough in the afternoon that the hallways were starting to empty, and by the time he got close almost literally ran into Professor Snape coming around the corner. Snape put a hand up and stopped him. 

“I have a message to send, Mr. Albrecht. But just because I’m not there, don’t think you can get away with a jail-break.” Snape said. 

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Professor. I am not that stupid.” Konrad replied with a wink. 

“Good.” Then Snape disappeared down the hall toward the Slytherin dungeons. Snape might hate Potter personally, Konrad realized, but he was probably a member of the Order if Dumbledor trusted him to each Harry occlumency, and thus at least wanted to keep Harry somewhere other than Azkaban.

Konrad finally made it to the door of Umbridge’s office and put his ear to the door. 

“The Cruciatus Curse should loosen your tongue.” Umbridge said with her particular brand of cheerful menace. 

“That’s illegal!” Hermione protested. As if that had stopped her before.

“What the Minister doesn’t know, can’t be used against him…He never knew I was the one who ordered Dementors after Potter last summer, but was delighted to be given the chance to expel him all the same.” 

“It was you!?” Harry asked, completely enraged.

“Somebody had to act! They were all whimpering about silencing you somehow, discrediting you somehow, but I’m the only one who did something about it. But you wiggled out of if that time, didn’t you Potter? Well not this time.” She paused. “Cruc-”

She didn’t get a chance to finish because the moment she’d paused, Konrad had his wand out and pointed at the door while he ducked off to the side behind the wall. 

“Evomus!” 

The door exploded outward toward the hallway, hit by a breaching spell designed to not shower the inside of a room with a lethal rain of splinters. It also created enough of a distraction that Harry and Hermione were able to break free of their captors by way of punching them in face or elbow them in the gut and get their wands, disarming the other Inquisitorial squad members in rapid succession. 

Umbridge managed to deflect Harry and Hermione’s disarms with a shield charm, but Konrad had her at wand-point. Everyone else got their wands from the injured and disarmed inquisitors, and holding the Squad at bay, started to slowly back out of the room. 

“Harry, everyone, get behind me! Keep the Hitlerjugend off my back. I’ll deal with her.” Konrad said, in perfectly calm even tones. Or at least that’s what he thought his tone was. Hermione looked at him like she was seeing something risen from the depths of hell. 

“You!” Umbridge exclaimed. “Assaulting the Senior Undersecretary for Magic, High Inquisitor and Headmistress of Hogwarts!? You’re going straight to Azkaban where you belong!”

“Think again, you sadistic bitch!” Konrad snarled, insulting her in english this time. “I just caught you in the middle of using the Cruciatus on a student!”

“It’s your word and a few miscreants against mine! No one at the ministry will believe you!” She protested. Her breath heaved, and Konrad saw her feet shift so she could move.

“I’ve had your office bugged for months.” Konrad smirked. “I have everything you’ve ever said, and I’ve implicated your precious Minister in the abuse of students too. Surrender, and you can join him in Azkaban. Or resist. Please, you malignant Fotze, do me the favor of resisting.”

She moved first, trying to catch him off balance “Stupefy!”, but Konrad expected that and blocked it with his own shield charm. 

“Los geht’s” said Konrad grinned and extended his wand “Bombarda!” The artillery charm slammed into her own magical wards. Konrad wasn’t aiming to annoy or hinder, he wasn’t fucking around with stunners. He was aiming to turn Dolores Umbridge into mulch. And from the look on her face, eyes wide and white as a sheet, she knew it. She sprang forward, out of her office toward him trying to close the range so he wouldn't have time to get defensive spells off. But Konrad was fast on his footwork, and even faster with his wand. He sidestepped and backed off, deflecting the entrail-expelling curse she tried to use to disembowel him. 

Doing that also got the Slytherins out of his line of fire, literally, only to come under attack from the others, setting off a battle within the corridors between students. But he couldn’t worry about that. Konrad deflected a blasting curse, then uttered another spell. “Expecto Patronum!” Summoning his patronus, which got to work intercepting Umbridge’s spells and allowing him to go on the attack. 

“Bombarda! Bombarda Maxima!” He chained the two spells together in rapid succession and while she blocked both, the pressure waved caused by the second as her shield collapsed sent her tumbling backward down a short flight of stairs. Konrad moved forward, wanting to keep up the pressure, but had no choice but to dive backwards when he looked down to see a wand pointed at his face.

“Fulmina!” She shouted, and lightning lept from her wand, but Konrad was already out of arc and rolling backward. The lightning struck the ceiling and sent slabs of stone cascading down to the floor beneath, right where he’d stood. The crash of thunder was deafening, but he rolled into a crouch.

“Incendio!” He cried, creating a gout of flame that he whipped into a flaming whirlwind that he sent down the stairs trying to slow Umbridge down and buy time to regain his hearing.

Lights flashed behind him but he had to trust that his friends had the reactionary garbage tied down. 

The first thing he heard when the ringing died down was another student shout. “Konrad’s Fighting Umbridge! Konrad’s Fighting Umbridge!” Great, he had an audience to worry about. 

His patronus was hovering around him like a guardian angel when he heard Umbridge cast her own Patronus charm. A spectral persian cat bounded up the stairs and attacked his badger. The resulting scrape took both of them out of commission for defensive purposes. This time, he did chance a glance behind him. Ron and Neville were hedging the slytherin’s spells away with Scutum charms, but left gaps that allowed Harry, Hermione, Neville, and Luna to fire back. They weren’t looking to kill, neither were the Slytherins. It was mostly stunners, disarms, and various debilitating jinxes. Not that he could blame any of them. 

They weren’t ready to kill, none of them were, but he was. If he could manage it. 

“Out of my way!” He heard Umbridge scream from a bit down the hall. He bolted after her, down the stairs to the first landing, around the corner and saw a crowd of students. 

“Scheiße!” Konrad wasn’t happy about that, he would need to watch his fire. Worse, Umbridge knew it. She turned around and smiled up at him, her wand outstretched. She sent out a few probing jinxes to test his defenses, trying to catch her breath. None of them struck home, but they weren’t meant to. They were meant to keep him from getting his own spells off. But it gave him the time he needed to see who was watching. Observe, orient, decide, act. He had to get inside her decision loop, and right now, the best way to do that was to remove her human shields from the board. 

He looked around. There was a suit of armor decorating the wall opposite him. He saw Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan in the crowd of students. “Dean, Seamus, wall her off!” They understood what he meant, and moved forward through the crowd of other students toward Umbridge. Once they got to the front of the mass of students, they both cast the Scutum charm and walling Umbridge off from the others. Several others who he’d taught the spell to did the same. Both Parvati twins, Hannnah Abbot, Ernest McMillan, and Anthony Goldstein. They created a multilayered shield-wall that would protect against anything but a killing curse. 

Umbridge looked behind her and knew she was trapped, the student’s no longer possible collateral damage. Konrad watched her panicked fight, flight, or freeze response go into overdrive and transition to a hot rage. She tried another entrail-expelling curse, which he dodged by ducking back behind the corner, when he came back around the corner it was with a shield charm already up and waiting to deflect her follow-up attack which turned out to be a shield-breaker. Konrad’s shield collapsed and he was trying to bring up another when he heard it. 

"Avada Kadavera!"

His body reacted purely on instinct, grabbing the suit of armor off the wall and swinging it down in front of himself just in time to intercept the killing curse. The spell struck the armor and broke it apart at the joints, causing it to clatter to the floor. The students, who until that moment had largely been cheering and clapping were struck dumb, but so was Umbridge, having clearly expected Konrad to be dead. With a flick of his wand, he sent the pieces of armor at her as fast as he could throw them. She threw up a shield charm which tore the armor pieces apart and scattered them about her before caving in, leaving her momentarily defenseless.

“Levicorpus!” He grabbed her with his outstretched magic and swung his wand-hand up, slamming her against the vaulted ceiling, which became spattered red with blood, then let her drop down the twenty meters to the floor. Most of the younger students averted their eyes, some of the older students couldn’t pull their eyes away. One of the senior students, a seventh year Hufflepuff shrouded the scene in mist so that the others couldn’t see. Which was good, because Konrad followed up to make sure she was stone-cold-dead. 

“Confrigo!”

Dolores Umbridge exploded. Blood and tiny bits of her sprayed in all directions, showering the magical shield wall with gore.

It was a strange and surreal moment. That same seventh year hufflepuff walked forward, the shield wall parted for them through the mist, and despite her own evident horror she used a vanishment charm to clean up most of the mess. There was nothing that could be done about the blood on the walls, but at least the body was gone. There were murmurs. On the one hand, they just saw a woman get killed. On the other hand, she was someone every single one of them hated, even the innocent first years. 

Konrad just stood there, panting and coming down off an adrenaline high. His shaking fingers absently reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and he took his first drag while most of the other students kept staring at him. It was like that for a long moment. The sounds of battle behind him died down, and Konrad didn’t particularly care who won. He just glared down at the pool of blood on the floor and the drops falling down from the ceiling. The shield wall vanished and some students, the older ones, instinctively moved forward to keep the younger ones from having to see. A couple first and second years who were denied their chance to see what was left of a dead body complained, but they were roundly shushed. Others were crying.

Loud footsteps came from behind Konrad, who wheeled around instinctively, wand out.

“Ho ho there mate it’s just us,” Ron started to say until he noticed all the blood “blimey… Bugger me.”

Hermione saw it and looked like she was about to vomit. Luna tilted her head and hmmmed. She’d seen her mom blow up so this wasn’t new. Neville glared down at the mortal remains of Dolores Umbridge and spat down the stairs in contempt. “Bitch got what she deserved…”

Finally, Harry. Harry stepped in front of Konrad, who wordlessly took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled.

“Right e’ryone, nothin to see here!” Seamus turned around and started shooing the crowd away, with help from the prefects and a few of the sixth and seventh years. 

Konrad took another drag from his cigarette, in fact, it was nearly spent he was smoking it down that fast. He took a deep breath of fresh ozone-filled air that smelled of sweet iron and then asked a very important question. “What the hell was this about, Harry? Why did I just risk death and still risk Azkaban?” He’d back Harry to the nines, but he deserved to know why.

“Voldemort has my godfather.” Harry “He’s torturing him, right now, in the Department of Mysteries.” Harry looked like he was about to explode. “We have to go, now.”

Konrad gritted his teeth. “Harry. Remember what I said about false sendings? He sent you a lure. The Department of Mysteries is a government office, people work there during the day.” He said pointedly, and finished off his cigarette. “Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy killing Umbridge, because I certainly did.” He flicked the cigarette butt down the stairs into the red sticky pond. Then he walked down, and plucked her wand off the floor. “She had it coming. But I don’t like walking into obvious traps.”

“But” Harry tried to protest, Konrad stopped him, grabbing him by the shoulder and looking him straight in the eyes. Harry was terrified, but not of him. Konrad didn’t think he was, anyway.

“No buts. Harry, you’re not thinking clearly.” Konrad said. “He’s your godfather, you love him, it’s understandable. But Voldemort wants you in the department of mysteries. Why should we give him what he wants? What gain is there that justifies the risk? Keep in mind that Sirius. Isn’t. There.”

Harry stammered for a second, wanting to argue, then took a deep breath and organized his thoughts. “Assuming Sirius isn’t…” He started “Whatever it is that’s down there, he wants it. He can’t have it. Even if he doesn’t have Sirius, he’s still making his move for it right now. We also have a good chance of exposing him openly and taking down Minister Fudge, along with a number of Voldemort’s agents.”

“And is that gain worth risking yourself, and me?” Because of course Konrad was going with him.

“And me.” Hermione said, joining a chorus of the same from Ron, Neville, and Luna.

Harry looked stricken. He had planned on going alone, but he knew his friends wouldn’t let him. He looked at all of them, back and forth, then nodded. “Yes. The longer the ministry can deny Voldemort’s existence, the easier it will be for him to infiltrate the Ministry, and the more buggered everyone is.”

“Okay.” Konrad nodded. “Now we put it to vote, and we abide by that vote, anyone who says no doesn’t have to come. I vote yes. Because I am certainly not sticking around here right now as prey for the Aurors”

Ron raised his hand “Aye”, then Ginny “Aye”, Hermione “Aye”, Neville “Aye”, Luna “Aye”.

“Motion carried unanimously.” Konrad said, turning to Ginny and looking her straight in the eyes as well. “Though Ginny I hate to do this, but you need to stay behind. Get Professors Flitwick and Vector, tell them and whatever Aurors show up what happened here. And get the record from the balcony, make sure they listen to it, the last few tracks ought to cover tonight. Can you transmute wax to vinyl?”

She stared daggers at him. “Yes, Hermione showed me, but why me?”

“Because you’re a fourth year, you can get into the Gryffindor barracks, and if your mother loses two children in this mess I just have to hope I die with you.”

“And if I let you die, she’d bury me in the yard.” Ron added.

“That’s fair, I know what she’s like.” Ginny replied, and Ron nodded furiously. One did not mess with mama bear Weasley, and Konrad knew that by reputation.

“Good. Make a copy, give Professor McGonagall the original, only give the Aurors copies. The bug is under the writing desk in Umbridge’s office.” And Konrad told her the location of the radio receiver “Make sure that Professor McGonagall gets those too.”

“Okay, so how are we getting to the Department of Mysteries?” Hermione asked. Harry shrugged. 

“The Witch is Dead. Her fireplace?” Konrad suggested. 

“I was going to suggest the Thestrals.” Luna noted “The Floo Network is faster. But the trace is on us, they’ll know where we’ve gone.”

“That’s a good thing.” Hermione said. “We’ll want Aurors as backup.”

“No, that won’t work. The Ministry is protected, you can only get in through specifically keyed entrances. I know where one is, but we’ll have to fly there, so we use the Thestrals.”

“That reminds me…” Konrad said, conjuring his badger patronus again. “Find Dumbledore, tell him that I had to kill Umbridge, and we’re going after Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries.” After he was done instructing the cantankerous little phantom mustelid, he sent it off and it scampered off through the walls

“We should go, before the Professors arrive.” Harry said. Everyone agreed, and off they went, avoiding the passages that the professors would use to get to Umbridge’s office from their apartments, they existed out of the grand entrance and jogged out toward the forbidden forest. 

“Follow me!” Luna practically sang. Everyone else was jogging, she was skipping. “I know where they are.”

There might be a lot of students who would see Thestrals now, but Ron, Hermione, and Neville were not among them yet. They hadn’t actually seen Umbridge die, so when they arrived at the clearing and Luna stopped, all three of them had no idea where the animals were, or what they needed to do. Luna, Harry and Konrad helped wrangle the Threstrals which really were lovely creatures except for being ugly as sin, and got them safely mounted. 

Then away they all went through the rapidly dimming light of the Scottish Highlands. It was already around eight pm when they took off, moving at speeds that no living non-magical creature could actually maintain, let alone do so without sending riders careening off to their deaths, it only took two hours to reach the outskirts of London and start to zero in on the Ministry. 

Konrad was expecting something different. He’d never actually been to the Ministry before, and he was expecting some gothic or more appropriately baroque civic edifice. Instead, the exterior of the Ministry of Magic was a nondescript low-rise masonry building that looked like it was built in the late 19th century. 

The Thestrals landed near a broken down and vandalized telephone booth in a small quadrangle off the highstreet. When they dismounted, the Threstrals started foraging for food at a nearby dumpster, while Harry motioned for everyone to get inside the phone both. They all crammed inside.   
  
“Whoever’s nearest the receiver, dial six-two-four-four-two.” Harry said. That person was Ron, who managed to dial the rotary phone with some very strange contortions of his elbow. As it whirred back into place, a female voice chimed within the booth. 

“Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state your name and business.”

“Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood and Konrad Albrecht. We’re here to prevent a calamity, unless the Ministry can do it first.”

“Thank you.” Chimed the emotionless voice. “Visitors, please take the badges and attach them to the front of your robes.” Half a dozen badges slid down the chute where returned coins were supposed to exit the pay-phone.

It was such a surreal experience that Konrad lost it laughing. Not the happy laughter, but slightly insane giggling. He kept laughing even while, with some bodily contortion in the confined space, the badges were passed around and put on. He did look at it though.

‘Konrad Albrecht, disaster response mission’

It did not help with the laughter.

“Visitors to the Ministry you are required to submit to a search, and present your wand for registration at the security desk, which is located at the far end of the atrium.”

“Fine, can we go?” Harry asked the phone booth. And they were moving, it was evidently some kind of magical lift that carried them through the pavement, past the sewers, water mains, and electrical cables of London, and down into darkness until Konrad could see the shimmering golden glow of the atrium beneat them. 

When the lift stopped, the voice spoke again. 

“The Ministry wishes you a pleasant evening.” And then the doors opened and they were collectively ejected from the lift. 

The lights of the Ministry were dimmed, but Konrad could see just how massive the civic edifice was on the inside. It was larger than any medieval cathedral he’d ever been in, with vaulted ceilings at least forty meters high. The only sound that could be heard at all were their footsteps, and the water from the golden fountain in the middle of the atrium, and all of those sounds echoed through the completely empty deserted space. The security desk was also empty, which Konrad thought was odd. 

“This isn’t right.” Konrad said. “This building should at least have guards, or janitors. Something.” He had both wands out, his and Umbridge’s, and was keeping all of his senses on high alert. Ambushes were made of situations like this.

“I know.” Harry said, as they passed through a golden gate toward a set of lifts. Harry pressed the down button, and a lift clattered into sight immediately and its safety grating opened to a rusty clanking that made no sense given that gold doesn't rust. They dashed inside and Harry hit the number nine button, which started their descent. When it did stop a moment later, that same female voice announced their destination.

“Department of Mysteries.”

The lift door opened, and everyone exited into the dark hallways of the Department of Mysteries. Nothing moved but the nearest torches, and Harry turned to a plain black door.

“Let’s go.” Harry said, and Konrad followed right behind him, until he was two meters from the door, then he stopped. “Okay everyone, we need make entry, then sweep and clear whatever we find on the other side. Konrad, you take point.”

“Jawohl.” Konrad nodded approvingly. Everyone had their wands out, and Konrad approached the door. “Protego duo” he canted, throwing up an enhanced shield charm around himself. The door opened, and Konrad burst inside, casting a quick glance around the entire room, and spiraling to the left. It was a circular space, entirely black from floor to ceiling, handle-less black doors were set at intervals all around the room, interspersed with candle branches that burned with blue flames, giving the floor the appearance of being water. 

Harry followed a second afterward and spiraled to the right, Hermione and Ron took up positions just on the inside of the door, one on each side, while the last two, Neville and Ron, took up the rear. 

“Okay, we’re clear.” Harry said. “Secure the door if you please, Ron.” Ron did, shutting the door behind him. As soon as he did, everything started to rumble and Konrad could hear the scrape of stone against stone. The circular walls were rotating. Everyone gravitated toward the center of the room, into a circle with their wands facing out toward the dozen doors that lined the circular wall. The walls rotated faster and faster, until the candle flames resembled argon lights. Then just as abruptly as it began, it stopped, and the walls were stationary again. 

“And now all I can see is blue…” Konrad commented.

“I feel like there’s a song that could be written about that.” Luna said, smirking. While Ron said the other thing everyone else was thinking.

“What was that about?”

“I think it was to stop us from knowing which door we came in from.” Hermione said in hushed tones. “We just have to hold on to the the forlorn hope that it’s normal in this department.” From the look on her face, Konrad didn’t think she put much stock in that, and he agreed. But it was a government building made by wizards, for wizards, and thus things often became strange. 

“So how do we get back out?” Neville asked.

“We’ll have to burn that bridge when we get to it.” Konrad replied, and he had an idea. He reached into one of his magically cavernous pockets and removed some white chalk. “From now on, we mark every door we go through, and if we find ourselves in a maze, we mark the way we came so we can work our way back.” He broke the chalk into pieces, and passed them out. “Sign your names each time you mark something.”

“The last maze I was in was full of murderous hedgerows.” Harry said, taking the chalk “But good thinking.” He looked around. “In the dreams, I always went through a door that led to a room that glitters. We’ll have to try a few doors. I’ll know the way when I see it.”

Konrad didn’t like that idea, but there was nothing for it. “Then we stack up by each door we try, no splitting up and opening a bunch at once.”

“Right.” Harry replied. Harry picked a door more or less at random, Marked it with chalk as having already been checked, and everyone stacked up along the sides of the frame. Harry reached his arm around and pushed on the door, which opened easily. Konrad, at the frame on the other side, peered around the door-jam and looked inside at the same time Harry did, both of their wands out to strike.

It was a long rectangular room, much brighter than the one they were in given the massive chandeliers on the ceiling. There were a number of desks, and a massive aquarium with enough water for them all to swim in filled with blue-green water, and several large floating orbs. 

“What the hell are those?” Harry asked. Konrad knew, and while Luna was speculating that they were some sort of maggot, he and Hermione spoke simultaneously.

“They’re brains.” The two looked at each other and Konrad said it first. “Jinx, you owe me a Fanta.” Hermione groaned.

“I wonder what they’re doing with them?” Ron asked, and he tried to go inside to have a closer look. Konrad stopped him. 

“Nope. We don’t have time to clear every single room we check.” Konrad told him. “And it just opens up more avenues of attack.”

“But there are other doors in there, shouldn’t we check those?” Ron protested. 

“No, Konrad is right.” Harry said, making it final. “In the dream, I went through the glittering room into the next one, this isn’t the right room, we should check another.” He and Konrad backed away, and Harry flicked his wand to pull the door closed.

No sooner than the door was shut, the wall started to rotate again. When it stopped, Harry picked the door immediately opposite him, and they repeated the process. This one was a large rectangular room set up like a sunken amphitheater. In the center there was a raised dais with an ancient stone archway at the center. It was so old that Konrad was surprised it was still standing. The weirdest thing though was the tattered black curtain that, despite the complete stillness of the air, fluttered slightly as if there was a breeze.

Harry tried to step forward, but again, Konrad stopped him with a hand to the shoulder. 

“I just want to check it out. There’s… something about it.” Harry said.

“I know, I feel it too.” And Konrad knew what it was. It was the call to the void, brought on by the fact that he felt guilty for living while others had died. “It’s Death, Harry.”

Luna also stood transfixed and started to move forward “Mum?”. She asked and it took Neville to stop her.

Hermione’s eyes stared forward. She recognized it from something she’d read. “It’s The Veil.” She gasped. “A physical manifestation of the boundary between life and death. We must not pass through that.”

Making an executive decision, Konrad marked the door with chalk, then flicked his wand to close the door. Harry and Luna snapped out of it. Once again the walls started spinning.

“Bloody hell, what happened to you two?” Ron asked Luna and Harry.

“I heard my mum’s voice. Calling to me.” Luna said. “It was like she wanted me to join her.”

“And you would have.” Konrad said. “You didn’t hear anything because you haven’t lost anyone close to you or feel guilty about living.” He said to Ron and Hermione.

Neville, Ron, and Hermione stared at him. “Right, moving on.” Ron finally said. He was going for a casual voice tone but it just came out awkward. What does one even say to that?

Harry tried another door at random, and it didn’t budge. He threw his weight against it, nothing.

“That’s it then!” Ron said excitedly, and added his weight to Harry’s.

“No. Leave that one alone.” Hermione cautioned. “In his dream, Harry could open all the doors, so anything locked isn’t where we need to be.”

“Oh, right then.” Harry said, backing away. Hermione marked the door with her own chalk and noted it down as impassable. The walls rotated again, which Konrad found interesting without the door opening in the first place. 

Everyone arranged themselves just as before at the next door that Harry picked, again more or less at random, and Harry opened it.

“This is it.” He declared. It was a room full of sparkling light that caused everyone to shield their eyes to give them time to adjust. Once they did, Konrad saw clocks. He saw all of the clocks, on every surface. On the walls, the ceilings, and on the rows of desks that lined the room. Large and small, grandfather clocks with swinging pendulums, small carriage clocks, to simple mechanical wall-clocks and stop-watches. A busy ticking filled the space to the point that it sounded like a marching army.

“The relentless march of time?” Ron joked. No one failed to roll their eyes.

“This way.” Harry said, but they swept and cleared the room in good order, checking the corners and making sure no one hid behind any of the various objects. Harry moved toward a glittering bell-jar in the center of the room that looked like it was fully of a glistening wind that was emitting most of the dazzling light. Inside, there was a hummingbird being continuously born and pulled back into its egg, like the process of its hatching and maturation was playing played out and then rewound.

“We’ve got to keep going.” Harry said, as Luna paused by the jar to marvel at that whole process.

“Right, sorry Harry.” Luna replied, and stepped away. “There are so many interesting things in this place. I wonder what they do with it all?”

There was only one door, and thus only one way to do. “And this is it.” Harry said. “Our way forward.”

Harry opened the door, and Konrad found himself looking into a cavernous space covered floor to ceiling in shelves that held nothing but dusty glass orbs. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them in a space this large. 

“Mein Gott, please tell me we don’t have to look through all of these?” He asked the collective.

“Well I doubt very much they have a filing system for ‘Dark Wizard Superweapons’ or whatever.” Ron cracked a sarcastic joke but no one laughed.

The whole chamber was lit in blue-flamed candles, and was very cold. They could see their breath in mist. 

“It’s row ninety seven. This is fifty three” Harry said, indicating the nearest row. Hermione looked around, trying to get a sense for the organization of the place. 

“We need to go right, I think.” She said. 

“Okay.” Konrad said. “Advance by twos, check each row for hostile targets.” 

They did. Him and Harry took point, Konrad on the left, Harry on the right. They each peered down their row with their wands out and then took up a position guarding that avenue of approach. Hermione and Ron leap-frogged to the next row. Once they were in position, Neville and Luna got the next, and the cycle repeated so that they always had someone protecting the front, rear, and flanks. 

Konrad listened hard for any sign of approach, and for traps. None of this felt right to him, he felt like at any moment someone was going to start chucking killing curses down the rows of little glass orbs at them, or unleash some sort of horror with too-many-tentacles and eyestalks. He did his best to keep from hyperventilating. It reminded him too much of that damned forest in Brandenburg. 

“Down this way” Harry whispered when they hit the ninety-seventh row, and lead them down that way. It was also arranged with columns, labeled alphabetically with additive repeats, so they did the same clearing advance that way as well. 

Harry looked around, frantically. “He might be… “

“Harry.” Konrad’s voice cut through the darkness. “Remember, Sirius is not here. What was Voldemort after?”

That snapped Harry out of it. “One of the orbs I think.”

“This one has your name on it Harry.” Ron said. He tried to reach out and pick it up, but something stopped him. Like trying to put two magnets together, he simply couldn’t get close enough. He tried a few spells, tried to summon it to his hand. None of them worked. Harry stepped toward Ron and peered at the orb, which was one of the ones with a shimmering golden light. He wasn’t as tall as Ron, and had to crane his neck a bit, but Konrad who’d stepped up beside both of them could read it just fine. 

The orb was tagged in spidery writing with Harry’s name, and a sixteen year old date. Plus details. ‘S.P.T. to A.P.W.B.D. Dark Lord and ?Harry Potter’. He looked at several of the others on the shelf. Initials, dates, named individuals. Same notation. In each one, only one or two were actually named.

“What’s your name doin’ down here?” Ron asked. Konrad started putting things together. Sybill Patricia Trelawney to Albus Percival Wulfrick Brian Dumbledore. He remembered her having a few legitimate prophecies, and who else would she tell them to but Dumbledore? But, he noted, the only one actually named was Harry. He reached out and tried to touch the orb, and had all the success Ron did. Which is to say none. 

Harry reached out to grab hold of it. “Harry, don’t.” Hermione cautioned him. 

“Why not? It’s got my name on it, and it’s something to do with me.”

“Don’t Harry.” Neville was sweating bullets. “This doesn’t feel right.”

Konrad had warring thoughts. On the one hand, he really wanted to know if he was right. On the other hand, Neville was right. It didn’t feel right. He felt like the names and lack of names were significant, but he couldn’t put a finger on why, and he felt like he was missing something like forgetting to turn the oven off. Harry glanced at him.

“It’s up to you Waffenbruder. I think it's a prophecy record, so make sure you want to know.” Konrad said. Harry hesitated, but picked up the orb, then cleared away the dust and cobwebs. Nothing happened.

Then, from behind them, a voice, in the kind of accent that Konrad immediately recognized as belonging to a definite class-enemy.

“Very good, Potter. Now turn around, nice and slowly, and give that to me.” Black shapes were emerging out of the air all around them, blocking their way left, right forward and backward along the row. Konrad recognized that they didn't apparate in, but were simply emerging from hiding places. Must have been shadowing them discreetly. He filed that bit of information away, because it probably meant the place was warded. There were a dozen of them, wearing hoods and masks, each with a wand tip pointed in their directions. “To me, Potter.” The voice said again, and it reminded Konrad of Draco Malfoy. 

Outnumbered two to one, they put their wands out in turn. A harsh insane-sounding laugh echoed through the darkness, it’s bearer just behind the first speaker. Harry glanced over and winked at Konrad, who nodded ever so slightly.

“Where’s Sirius?” Harry asked. The feminine voice laughed again. 

“The whittle baby had a bad dweam and thought what it dreamed was twue!” She cackled again. “The Dark Lord Always Knows!”

Harry chanced a whisper. “Don’t do anything. Not yet.”

“You hear him? You hear him? Giving instructions to the other children as if he dreams of fighting us?!” The woman shrieked. 

“Oh you don’t know Potter like I do, Bellatrix.” The bourgeois said. “He has a great weakness for heroics. The Dark Lord understands this about him. Now hand over the Prophecy, Potter. Or we start using wands.”

“Suits us just fine…” Konrad remarked, he had one of his wands leveled at each Lucius Malfoy, and Bellatrix LeStrange. 

Bellatrix was the one who made the first move. 

“Accio Prof!” She shrieked, trying to summon the orb, but Harry was ready for her.

“Protego!” His shield charm blocked the spell entirely.

“Ooooh! The little wizard know show to play!” Bellatrix laughed again. “Very well then!” She raised her wand again, but Lucius intercepted her hand and forced it down.

“No! If you smash it!” That was when Harry and Konrad both smirked, it was practically telepathy. Between Snape and Konrad’s patronus, they probably had backup on the way. They needed to stall. 

“Oh fine!” Bellatrix said, and stepped forward. She removed her mask and hood, and the effect was disturbing. The better part of two decades spent in Azkaban had hollowed her out, making her gaunt and nearly skeletal. “Take the little one, make him watch as we torture her. I’ll do it.”

“I don’t think so.” Harry said, He and Konrad walled Luna off from the Deatheaters, who were starting to move in, and Harry held the orb to his chest. “If you try that, you’ll end up smashing this. And I suspect your boss won’t be too happy if you go back without it, will he?”

“What kind of prophecy are we talking about here?” Konrad asked. “I am afraid I’m not from around here.”

“Oh, stupid little foreign Mudblood, you’re not kidding are you? No idea?” Bellatrix mocked him. 

“Why does Voldemort want it?” Konrad followed up, and the Deatheaters let out low hisses of offense. 

“You dare speak his name!?” Bellatrix replied.

“I absolutely do. He’s just like Hitler, ranting and raving about the pure Aryan race, but not being of it, half-blood that Voldemort-” Konrad was cut off by the immediate need to defend himself.

“Stupe-” Bellatrix tried to attack, but Malfoy shoved her hand out of the way, and the stunner hit a shelf several feet way, smashing several orbs. “He dares! He dares! Polluting the Master’s name with his unworthy lips!”

“Wait until we have the prophecy!” Malfoy hissed. But he continued. “Did Dumbledore never tell you the reason you have your scar, Potter? No wonder you never came down here before. The Dark Lord thought natural curiosity would draw you down here, once he showed you the exact location.”

“And let me guess.” Harry said, winking at Konrad again, who prepared himself “He needed me to fetch it because his actual name, isn’t listed on the tin? Just Dark Lord and not Volde-”

Bellatrix screamed in rage, which Konrad took as his cue. 

“Bombarda maxima!” He swung one of his wands toward Malfoy and the other toward one of the other Deatheaters, a chorus of spells from Harry, Ron, Hermione, Luna, and Neville echoed through the darkness, each at their own targets. Konrad also felt something bump into his side, but it didn't hurt so he didn't pay it much attention. 

Everything exploded. The Deatheaters shielded themselves, but the blast waves shattered the contents of shelves in a shower of broken glass, splintered wood and the wafting cacophony of ancient prophets that distracted the Deatheaters.

“Run!” Harry shouted. Konrad used the wand in his left hand

“Scutum Negata!” A shimmering field appeared above his head as he rocked the former Umbridge wand back and forth like a metronome. It shielded them from not only falling debris, but also incoming spells from above. Rather than a pell-mell sprint, all six young wizards retreated in good order down row ninety-seven, hitting any Deatheaters that got too close with whatever spells came readily to mind.

Someone reached out to grab Harry, who hit him with a stunner to the face and sent him careening into other shelves. A trio of them tried to block their path of retreat, and were met with a flurry of spells from Hermione, Neville, and Konrad. Two stunners and a blasting curse cast from the right hand from the latter. They managed to protect themselves from all three, but were caught off guard by follow up stunning spells from Harry, Luna, and Ron, and thrown backwards.

They retreated toward the shimmering bell-jar as fast as they could while maintaining their defensive posture, Konrad taking up the rear so no one got left behind or straggled. Deatheaters surrounded them, and could have actually attacked at any time, but between the Scutum charm and the necessity of not harming Harry they kept their attacks limited to easy to deflect stunners or attempts to physically grab him.

They bowled into the shimmering room, and Hermione sealed the door magically. 

“Leave them!” Konrad heard Lucius Malfoy yell through the door. “The Dark Lord will care much less for their injuries than if we come back without the prophecy! And remember, be gentle with Potter until we have the prophecy! Kill the others if you must, but we must retrieve it for the Dark Lord.” 

“Stand aside!” A rough voice shouted. “Alohamora!” 

Konrad had been forced to drop his Scutum charm to get through the door, and timed his next spell as the door flew open. 

“Fulmina!” 

A bolt of lightning lashed out from his right-hand wand through the door, striking the Deatheater on the other side before he even knew he was in danger. He fell writhing and steaming to the floor, twitched a few times and then lay still. 

“Back to the entryway!” Harry called, and they backed away through the glittering chamber, throwing spells through the door as fast as they could be cast to provide themselves covering fire. Another one came through under the cover of his own shield charm, looked at Konrad and began to shout.

“Avada Kedavera!” 

Konrad wasn’t in a position to dodge or get something in between himself and the killing curse, but Ron was already magically throwing a heavy oak desk at the door when the incantation was spoken. The desk intercepted the curse, and while the desk fell apart at every joint, the spell didn’t hit Konrad.

“Stupefy!” Neville cast a stunner that hit the somewhat unprepared Deatheater in the chest, sending him flying back into the others coming in through the chokepoint of the door.

“Well done Neville!” Luna encouraged him, and then followed up. “Reducto!” Collapsing the stone archway the door was mounted in, blocking off that entrance entirely. 

“That won’t hold for long, we have to go!” Konrad cautioned them all, and they quickened the pace of their retreat. Already they were trying to come through, but because the archway supported the ceiling above, massive stones kept falling down blocking the entrance as fast they could use magic to clear them. 

The six teenagers managed to get through the doorway and into the black-walled entryway. Hermione closed the door to the time-room, and magically seal it behind them, and the walls started to rotate again. When they stopped rotating, doors started to open. All but the room with The Veil, and the impassable one, and spells started pouring through. 

“Scutum Negata!” Hermione, Konrad and Harry shouted, putting up shields on three sides that held off the bombardment of stunners, disarms, and petrification hexes that poured in through the doors, but it forced their retreat to the Veil room. Having no choice but to try and hold against an attack on multiple sides, Luna opened that door, and they fell back through it, with Konrad holding his shield up as the last one through. 

“Bombarda Maxima!” Bellatrix managed to collapse his shield and send him bowling backwards through the door, knocking the others over and sending Umbridge’s wand careening out of his hand in the darkness.

Deatheaters surged in after them, Bellatrix LeStrange laughing like a madwoman the whole time. Konrad got to his feet, reached behind him with his left hand, and unholstered the Makarov, but he didn’t point it at anyone; he merely had it at the ready, and pretended to be clutching an injury, wincing. It was only half-deception. He felt like he’d probably cracked a rib in his tumble. But he had his wand out and ready to defend himself and his friends, who were also getting themselves into a defensive posture with their backs toward the dais and their wands pointed at the approaching gang of death eaters. Now numbering only ten rather than a dozen. One was badly injured, another one was simply dead. The robes and masks meant Konrad couldn’t assess any injuries the others had. 

One of the Deatheaters stepped forward. “Potter your race is run.” Lucius Malfoy removed his mask, showing his face. Like his son, he was blonde, and they shared many of the same pinch-faced features. They were so similar that Konrad couldn’t help but make jokes about inbreeding inside his own skull. “Now hand over the prophecy like a good boy.”

Harry gave them a cheeky grin and showed them his free hand. “Don’t have it. Sorry. But if you let my friends go, I might remember where I put it.”

“You’re in no position to bargain boy. There are ten of us, and only six of you.” Malfoy said. “You!” He pointed toward Konrad “You killed Mr. Nott and humiliated my son. I’ll take a special pleasure in ending you.” Lucius then pointed toward Neville “And you, Longbottom isn’t it? Well your grandmother is used to losing family to our cause.”

“Longbottom?” LeStrange exclaimed, a more-wicked-than-usual grin etching across her cadaverous face. “Why, I have had the pleasure of meeting your parents!”

“I know you have!” Roared Neville.

“Give us the prophecy Potter, or Little Longbottom will know what it’s like to be a permanent resident at St. Mungos!” LeStrange threatened. The reaction that got from Neville was something.

“Incendio!” 

Bellatrix deflected the conflagration he sent in her direction, but the fact that he managed to cast that shocked everyone, even Konrad who made it a point not to underestimate anyone. In that moment, another door burst open and five more people surged into the room. Two of them, Konrad recognized. Kingsley Shacklebolt and Sirius Black, and three others he didn’t know. One was a bit reedy and wearing somewhat shabby clothes but carried himself like a trained killer. A second was a slight young woman who didn’t seem much older than he was. The third was a crazy-looking old man who dressed like some kind of old-school inquisitor. But the presence of Shacklebolt and Black meant that the cavalry had arrived. 

Malfoy turned and raised his wand, but the young woman had already sent a stunning spell in his direction. Konrad didn’t wait to find out how that went. He pointed his wand at the Deatheater between him and Bellatrix, and unleashed a highlyeffective spell he knew for the ethical removal of fascism.

“Confrigo!”

The Deatheater he was aiming at got a protective spell up in time to not die, but the resulting blast knocked many of the others off their feet or unbalanced them, and gave the newcomers the advantage they needed to get down to the center of the room and form a united front his friends, who were already sending their own spells toward their enemies. 

The Deatheater fired back with a sweep of his wand that send a whip of purple flame toward Konrad, who interposed with his own shield charm “Protego Duo!” Konrad didn’t bother replying with stunnners or disarms; the only good fascist was a dead fascist, but he didn’t have time for anything to multisyllabic: “Bombarda!”

Unfortunately it was met by a shield charm, Konrad had to bodily throw himself aside to avoid being obliterated by the killing curse that the Deatheater sent back in response. 

Chaos was erupting around him, he could hear Bellatrix cackling and spitting curses at someone, he thought it was Shacklebolt, while the the reedy order member squared off against two Deatheaters and the young woman focused on getting Luna and Neville out of the line of fire, even while they unleashed their own spells in support of her efforts against one more. Ron and Hermione were engaged in desperate battle with their own pair of Deatheaters. Harry and Sirius were fighting side-by-side, sparing no thought to mercy against Malfoy and one other. The old inquisitor was dueling another.

Which left Konrad with his isolated, and clearly willing to use the killing curse, opponent. He didn’t have much time to think about how much facing off against two such people in one evening disturbed and terrified him. All he could do was survive it. 

The two wizards circled and probed each other’s skill and defenses with wordless probing jinxes and disarm attempts; until Konrad broke the stalemate with a lightning curse, which the dark wizard deflected seamlessly with a shield charm.

“What’s your name boy? Antonin Dolohov wants to know who he’s killing today!” Konrad recognized the Russian name, and the accent. He must have been from one of the various enclaves of former-whitist wizards that existed across western Europe. The kind who frequented Durmstrang.

“Konrad Albrecht, und ich bin Bürger der DDR!” Konrad immediately followed that up with a blasting curse, which was also deflected, and their duel began in earnest. Despite his early first shots, Konrad knew he was on the back foot, he was constantly having to defend himself, pulling out all the stops to do so including using his patronus to intercept hostile magic, but he wasn’t able to crack Dolohov’s defenses, and was constantly reacting to his opponent rather than the opposite. Then something he didn’t expect happened.

“Expelliarmus!” Dolohov shouted in rapid succession after Konrad’s shield charm had already collapsed to a blasting curse, knocking his wand out of his hand and behind him. Dolohov grinned and raised his wand, beginning to speak the incantation for a killing curse.

When Konrad whipped his left hand around, and got his Makarov into firing position. He squeezed the semi-automatic firearm’s trigger as fast as he could in Dolohov’s general direction in a sequence of near-deafening bangs. Dolohov realized too late just what Konrad was doing, and wasn’t fast enough with his defensive magics. Konrad emptied the entire magazine in full-on panic-fire, and only hit Dolohov three times. In the gut, chest, and right arm, but that was enough and Dolohov went down to the ground with a scream that rapidly transitioned to gurgling moans. 

Defenseless, Konrad scrambled to get his wand back. He sprinted back toward the dais where Harry and Sirius Black were in a two on one fight with Malfoy, dodging stray spells as he went, dove, to the floor and picked up his wand. He heard them finish that fight.

“Nice one James!” Sirius said in an obvious slip of the tongue and then saw Malfoy go flying to the other side of the room. Rolling to a fighting crouch, he couldn’t help but notice Bellatrix LaStrange rise from a pile of rubble and train her wand on either Sirius or Harry, he couldn’t tell. 

By that point though, he knew the wand motion for a Killing Curse when he saw one. Dolohov was still alive and trying to crawl away, so Konrad pointed his wand at the man.

“Avada Kedavra!”

“Levicorpus!” Konrad screamed

Konrad pulled, dragging Dolohov up into the air and stopping him in front of Harry. But the green energy-beam of the Killing Curse wasn’t aimed at Harry. It was aimed at Sirius, striking him in the chest and killing him instantly. 

Harry was simply stunned, watching his Godfather fall and his soul visibly rise from his body in the particularly strange eldritch environment to slip into the archway and across the Veil of Death. 

Harry screamed inconsolably a second later while Bellatrix LaStrange giggled like a mad-woman and skipped away. “I killed Sirius Black! I Killed Sirius Black!”

The reedy Order member who Konrad didn’t know managed to grab Harry, but he wasn’t actually strong enough to contain Harry’s rage, and Harry slipped free giving chase. Immediately after, before he could run after his friend, Konrad was under attack by another masked Deatheater. 

He saw the wand move out of the corner of his eye and only barely got a defensive spell up time to shield himself from a gout of flames.

The thin figure in the moth-eaten clothes interposed himself between Konrad and the other wizard. 

“Go!” he said in the crisp cultured tones he’d come to expect from the English professional class. “I”ve got this one. Get Harry, keep him from getting himself killed!”

Konrad nodded and legged it, running after Harry at a full sprint, zig-zagging to avoid any spells thrown his way. He bounded and clambered up the steep amphitheater bench-stairs to get to the door Harry came from, following the sounds of LaStrange’s laughter. Out past the circular room which wasn’t rotating anymore, the door to the Department of Mysteries entrance was blasted in. Konrad ran past, and saw a lift gate close. Konrad bolted to the lifts, got in one.

“Main entrance.” He said, twitching with anxiety the whole way up. The lift gate opened, and he saw Harry chasing Bellatrix at a dead-sprint. 

“You coming to get me Potter!?” Bellatrix said mockingly.

“Crucio!” In Harry’s voice, followed by her hitting the floor and sliding across it on her momentum screaming like a stuck pig or a snared rabbit. Harry was standing over her. Crying, screaming in rage, and panting with exhaustion all at once.

That’s when Konrad heard a voice so chilling that it stopped him in his own tracks. 

“You have to mean it Harry…. You know the spell…” A shadowy figure materialized out of the ether, whispering in Harry’s ear. Bellatrix started giggling again, as the gaunt robed and noseless figure of Voldemort fully materialized. “Do it!” Voldemort commanded Harry.

“Don’t do it, Harry! If she has to die, I’ll do it!” Konrad volunteered. Konrad had killed before, repeatedly. There was no need for Harry to cross that line. Let someone already stained add to their own cosmic balance sheet.

But Harry neither killed nor let Konrad do the needful. He whipped around in an attempt to level his wand and attack, but Voldemort knocked his wand out of his hand with a casual gesture. Konrad’s heart sank like a stone and tears flowed down his face. He was going to have to watch another friend die and there was nothing he could do about it. But maybe, just maybe, he could distract both dark wizards enough that Harry could escape. He’d die, but Harry might live. He couldn't live with himself if the opposite happened. He leveled his wand, and prepared to square off for a very brief fight with Lord Voldemort.

Green fire erupted from a nearby fireplace, and a grey-robed grey-bearded figure stepped out. It was Dumbledore; and all of the sudden Vodemort’s attention shifted fully away from Harry, and fully toward the one who was actually a threat. Bellatrix backed away on her hands and feet like a scuttling spider. 

“It was foolish of you to come here tonight Tom.” Dumbledore said. “The Aurors are on their way.”

Voldemort circled Dumbledore “By which time I shall be gone, and you...shall be dead.” There was a brief pause, and then the magic started to fly. Harry was thrown to the side like a rag-doll by nothing but secondary energy releases, and all Konrad could do was run and swan dive the ten or so meters to him, grab him around the chest under his arms and physically drag him into a little nook in the building’s obsidian masonry. 

“Scutum negata!” He threw his wand out in front of them and the shield materialized into existence. It was the only hope Konrad saw of surviving the secondary effects of that much raw power. Beams of energy from the archmages wands collided, sending sparks of lighting powerful enough to dislodge chunks of obsidian and granite arcing in all directions; like an array of tesla coils. 

Voldemort breathed a gout of flame that became unto a living thing. FIre in the form of a massive basilisk that struck at Dumbledore. The ancient wizard lined up with his wand and swung, slamming the fire-creatures’s head into the ceiling and back down again. As it died, Dumbledore gathered up it’s dying embers and threw them back at Voldemort, who shielded himself with nothing but a flick of his wand, but it gave Dumbledore the time he needed to gather up the water from the fountain, and imprison Voldemort in a swirling spherical vortex.

Voldemort, however, would not be drowned. He broke free, using some kind of pressure wave to scatter the waters, and threw some sort of anti-laser at the ancient wizard. An umbral beam of darkness and shadow, that Dumbledore defending himself against by conjuring a miniature sun. Through that, Voldemort almost looked like he was praying, holding his hands together and floating unaided in mid-air, until he let out a tremendous cry, like the wail of a banshee that shattered every single glass object in the entire entrance hall, and threw them at Dumbledore.

Dumbledore threw up a defense that wasn’t a shield, but a wall of entropy that ground the glass into harmless sand. 

Both wizards stood there, glaring hatred at each other for a long moment before Voldemort disappeared. He simply vanished. But even though Konrad dropped the shield and let Harry get up, it didn’t feel right. Nothing at all felt right. A strange air current seemed to move through the sand, and Harry jerked. He fell to the floor, straining against something. The only thing Konrad could think to even attempt was to hold on to him, so he didn’t spasm and hurt himself too badly. He held Harry against his own chest while Dumbledore knelt down to look him in the eye. 

“You’ve lost old man…” Harry said, in a strange combination of his voice and Voldemort’s.

“Harry. It isn’t how you are alike.” Dumbledore said. “It’s how you’re not.”

“Come on Waffenbruder” Konrad told him. “Voldemort is in your head. You know what it means to care for others, you’re not like him, don’t surrender. Never surrender.”

The others finally caught up. Ron, Hermione, Nevil, Luna. The members of the Order, all of them arrived through the lifts. Harry saw them all through eyes that weren’t just bloodshot, but he’d actually popped a blood-vessel and his corneas were red, with bloody tears streaming down his face. But it seemed that hearing that, and seeing the other people he loved and hadn’t lost yet...his body relaxed for a moment. 

Then Harry jerked again, and Konrad held him tighter, kissing him on the scalp. “You can do it Waffenbruder. We love you and we’re counting on you.”

“You’re the weak one, Tom.” Harry finally said, in his own voice. “You’ll never know love, or friendship. I feel sorry for you but you brought that on yourself.”

Harry’s body twisted and contorted in Konrad’s arms, but it wasn’t because he was resisting malign influence anymore. It was because that influence was visibly leaving, it was like a living shadow was being vomited up from his soul.

Voldemort physically manifested again, for a brief moment suspended in time for too long. He said something to Harry that Konrad couldn’t understand as the flames of the floo network sparked and roared to life. Dozens of aurors came pouring out along with Minister Fudge. A Minister Fudge who couldn’t help but see the Dark Lord right before he disapparated into nothing.

Cornellius fudge stood there for a second before uttering two words. “He’s Back.”

Most of the Aurors went down through the lifts into the Department of Mysteries, but two of them moved to flank Konrad. 

“Konrad Albrecht. Your wand, please.” One of them said. Harry, still half out of it muttered something in protest. 

“It’s okay Harry. I’m prepared for this.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” Dumbledore asked as he stood up, and Konrad handed his wand to the Auror. 

“Mr. Albrecht stands accused of the murder of Senior Undersecretary Dolores Umbridge.” The Auror replied. “He will await trial in Azkaban.”

“No. He will not.” Dumbledore said. “He is a Hogwarts student, and they must be expelled before they stand trial at Azkaban. The only way he can be expelled is if the current Headmaster does so, and that would be Minerva McGonagall; or if a full hearing of the Wizengamot is convened which would serve as his trial anyway. He will await trial at Hogwarts under close arrest.”

Dumbledore glared at Minister Fudge, as if daring him to intervene. Minister Fudge evidently thought better of it.

* * *

Two weeks later, Konrad sat in a chair in the Department of Mysteries in front of every single ranking member of the Wizengamot. Konrad knew he was in a Star Chamber court, down to the style of the dress which was decidedly 16th century. Two centuries behind the court-dress of the rest of Britain. 

However, Fudge was no longer presiding as Minister of Magic. Instead, it was the former head of the Auror’s office, Rufus Scrimgeour. He reminded Konrad somewhat of an old lion in his general appearance, and he spoke with the tough gravely voice of an old veteran. As his advocate, Minerva McGonagall sat by his side in a wheelchair; and carried with her a simple sack.

“Konrad Albrecht, you stand accused of the murder of Dolores Umbridge. What say you to this charge?” Scrimgeour asked.

“Nicht Schuldig er, sorry. Not guilty by way of justification. Self-Defense.” Konrad replied.

“Explain.” The Minister demanded, sternly.

“I came upon Dolores Umbridge, along with several members of her so-called Inquisitorial Squad, holding several of my fellow students captive. Those students included Harry Potter, Ron and Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Hermione Granger, and Luna Lovegood. Dolores Umbridge was preparing to use the Cruciatus Curse to extract information from Mr. Potter, and was in the middle of speaking the incantation when I interceded. A fight broke out once I informed her of the evidence I had collected against her and your predecessor from the start of year.” A series of hushed whispers, murmurs, and a few outraged gasps erupted from the assembled members. “In the context of that combat, she utilized a Killing Curse. I blocked it with a suit of armor, and counter-attacked. That counter-attack may have or may not have incapacitated her. Unwilling to risk death to another Killing Curse, I ensured that she would never stand back up again.”

One of the members raised their hand to speak, and was acknowledged by Minister Scrimgeour. “You expect us to believe the word of a fifth year student with a questionable disciplinary record over the word of the Aurors who investigated the scene? That you killed an experienced adult wizard in open combat?”

“If I might interject, Minister?” Professor McGonagall said. Scrimgeour nodded. “Mr. Albrecht is one of my best students and is skilled beyond his _Hogwarts_ year, given the circumstances of his admittance. His disciplinary record is marred only by the malfeasance of Dolores Umbridge. He has consistently gone out of his way to care for and protect all others in his presence, and helped save my life after I was assaulted by Aurors. What’s more, he is more than a competent combatant. In this very building he killed Antonin Dolohov, and John Nott in open combat while protecting his friends. The former was personally witnessed by Kingsley Shacklebolt and Mad-Eye Moody. So I dispute that attack on his character and competence in the strongest possible terms.”

Another chorus of murmurs from the assembled crowd of Wizengamot members. But Professor McGonagall wasn’t done.

“Even so, taking his word is not necessary. The entire exchange, as well as a great deal of other evidence of wrongdoing and abuse of students were recorded on covert listening devices Mr. Albrecht planted in Umbridge’s Office, with the approval and consent of Albus Dumbledore, Fillius Filtwick, and Myself.” That last part surprised Konrad to no end, but he kept a stone-face. She couldn’t rise, but she did pull a sheet of parchment from the sack and, using a small charm, floated it Rufus Scrimgeour who, reading it over, magically copied it for distribution to the rest of the court. 

“This court has not received any evidence to that effect.” Scrimgeour replied. “If we had, it would be a different story, but none of that supposed evidence has turned up. This document not-withstanding.” 

“I am aware. However, Mr. Albrecht has a somewhat paranoid disposition.” She smirked. “Fully justified by your predecessors evident subornation of certain members of the Auror’s office, who were given the documentary evidence in question as attested to in this affidavit signed by Ginny Weasley.” She floated that document to Scrimgeour, who read it, certified the authenticity of the original, and made magical copies for the rest. 

“And so? Get to the point Professor McGonagall.” Scrimgeour admonished her. “If we lack the evidence, this court cannot admit it.”

“In short, Mr. Albrecht made provisions that copies would be turned over to the Aurors, while I personally retained all originals, in addition to the surveillance devices he used.” She reached into the sack, and pulled out the vinyl record, along with the track listing out timestamps and major events. “This covers the night of the incident, I also have in my posession all other copies going back to the start of the school year, though they are, admittedly, unindexed.” She also pulled out the bug and the radio receiver. “If you wish to examine the devices?”

“Of course of course.” Scrimgeour then turned to his aid. “Percy Weasley, if you could please fetch a record player?” Konrad was taken aback. He'd been there helping the Minister and Umbridge. And he was a Weasley? Presumably Ron's older brother? Ron had talked about his other two older brothers, one was a Curse-Breaker for Gringots, the other was a Dragon-Tamer. But this one he'd spoken not a word of.

“Yes Minister.” Percy nodded, and stepped out of the room while Scrimgeour examined the bug.

“Hmm. And what does all of this...do? I’ve never seen anything like them.” Scrimgeour asked Konrad directly. Konrad got the distinct impression he was being tested; tested to make sure these were actually constructed by him.

“The small one is a muggle listening device called a Sugar-Cube Bug. It has a microphone which picks up sound, which is converted to an electrical signal and transmitted by radio to the large box, which is the receiver.” Konrad replied.

“And how were the records made?” Scrimgeour asked. 

“The runes on the receiver transmit the decoded sound to a modified record player, which cuts the grooves onto a wax disk, that is then transfigured into a vinyl record for playback.”

“Ah I see. That explains all the rune-work. Good craftsmanship too if a bit hastily carved from the looks of it. Hmm. How did you get around the problem with muggle electricity?”

“On the bug, the little metal disk is carved with runes that harness the school’s ley-lines for power. The same for the receiver, though they are internal cylinders you can access through a panel on the bottom.” Scrimgeour looked. It took him a second to figure it out, but he was able to remove the battery cover and remove the magical power sources.

Scrimgeour chuckled, something that Konrad took to be a good sign. “Very clever use of muggle artefacts Mr. Albrecht.”

“Thank you Minister Scrimgeour.” Konrad replied. At that moment, Percy walked in, somehow managing to look pompous while hauling a cumbersome record player. 

“Well let’s see what this tells us…” Scrimgeour said, placed the record on the turntable and the needle into place at the correct start location. Then he flipped the switch to on. 

The microphone was extremely sensitive. It was able to pick up the whole exchange. Not just Umbridge’s confession and mid-way-stop through the Cruciatus Curse that was only avoided by Konrad’s dramatic entry, but even Konrad’s conversation with Ginny Weasley about making sure the Aurors got the copy and Minerva the original. The atmosphere of the court went from skepticism to disquiet, to abject horror the longer that Umbridge spoke and by the time the fight ended, several were openly glad she was dead. 

“What sorts of abuse did she commit against other students that Minister Fudge is implicated in?” Scrimgeour asked, in even neutral tones.

“Torture of students, Minister, and illegal use of veritaserum.” Professor McGonagall said, trying to keep her tone neutral. “My last exhibit before I rest my defense.” She reached into the sack again, and removed a single quill, plus a number of photos. Percy strode over, and ostentatiously picked up the items and returned, setting them down on Scrimgeour’s podium.

“What are these?” He asked.

“Write a few lines of text with it, and you will see.” Professor McGonagall suggested. "The photos demonstrate the result."

He actually did. “I am the Minister for Mag-ach!” He looked down at his hand, and tried again. Same thing. “It’s cutting my hand and using the blood for ink.” He noted for the court. “How often was this administered?” He asked. “Mr. Albrecht?”

“Hundreds of lines, or pre-set times up to two hours, the pain increases over time. With enough repetition, the scars are permanent.” He held up his left hand, which still had several lines of text scrawled into white scar tissue.

“Good God!” Minister Scrimgeour exclaimed. “And she inflicted that on children?”

“First Years and up.” McGonagall said, still steaming. “The defense rests, Minister.”

“Indeed.” Rufus Scrimgeour replied. “The court moves to formally dismiss all charges against Mr. Albrecht on grounds of self-defense. All in favor?” Members raised their hands, almost all of them, only about ten of the hundred or so present did so. “The court also moves to begin a formal criminal inquiry into Former Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge, to determine the extent of his culpability in these crimes, and to discover co-conspirators. All in favor?”

Fewer raised their hands, but it was still a substantial majority. “Both motions carried. This court is adjourned. You are free to go Mr. Albrecht. Your wand will be restored to you, and you are free to return to Hogwarts in the next school year. Though do try to stay out of trouble next year? I know that may be easier said than done given the return of the Dark Lord but…”

“Thank you Minister, I shall make an honest attempt.” Konrad replied.

“Good. You are dismissed.” Scrimgeour said, and the assembled members began getting up. “And fetch that sack Mr. Weasley. There’s evidence in there.” Percy did, with all the self-importance he could manage.

Konrad got up, and turned toward Professor McGonagall. “Thank you Professor.”

“Don’t let it go to your head, Mr. Albrecht.” She cautioned him, but her voice tone was that of an affectionate grandmother. “Would you mind giving an old woman a push?”

Konrad was more than happy to. “Naturlich.” He maneuvered behind the wheelchair and started pushing her out the door. She reached up and patted him on the hand. 

“It’s good to know that despite everything, you’re still a nice young man.” She said. “This sort of thing can change a person, I’m glad it hasn’t turned you cold.”

“I’m… mentally scarred and damaged, but not cold.” He replied.

The bailiff on the other side of the door handed his wand and the makarov back to him. He holstered the wand, and dropped the gun into one of his many unnaturally cavernous pockets.

McGonagall chuckled. “You carry a gun? That must have been quite the surprise!”

Konrad shook his head. “Unfortunately, it’s the kind of surprise that only works once.” He had no idea how he would one-up it for the next time either, and he was absolutely sure there would be a next time. 

* * *

When they arrived in the main entrance hall to the Ministry, there was a small collection of people waiting for them. In the form of paparazzi. The camera flashes were blinding. 

“For this, Mr. Albrecht, you’re on your own!” Professor McGonagall said with a cheeky grin. 

“Traitor, abandoning me to my fate…” Konrad gave her a ribbing, but let go of the wheelchair. She booked it out of there and into the nearest floo with speed that she should not have been capable of. 

“Oh pish tosh, you handled Umbridge, you can handle journalists. I’ll see you back at school!” With a flesh of green fire, Professor McGonagall was gone.

No sooner was she gone than he had a microphone shoved in his face and he was sorely tempted to hex it and the person behind it into oblivion; but he didn’t. One of them, who wore a badge indicating he was from the Daily Prophet asked him a question. “How does it feel to have killed two deatheaters?”

“Your paper is an incompetent propaganda vehicle.” Konrad told the reporter, which was when another journalist from the Quibbler also stuck a microphone in his face and asked the same exact question. 

“The way I see it, Deatheaters kill men, women, children, and old folks. For every Deatheater I kill, I save the lives of their future victims.”

“Still, you’ve killed _at least_ three people and you’re not even twenty” the reporter followed up “Not all of them were Deatheaters.” Meaning Umbridge.

It was a good question, but that didn’t mean Konrad didn’t hate it. “The same logic applies.” He replied curtly.

“Aright! That’s enough! Leave the boy alone!” It was the bellowing gravely voice of the inquisitor-looking guy from the battle. Konrad didn’t know who he was but he hobbled forward on a cane and one eye had been replaced with an insane googly-eye that Konrad could swear was staring into his soul. Then he remembered McGonagall mentioning Mad-Eye Moody, and figured that was an apt description. 

The distraction he provided allowed Konrad the space he needed to slip toward the lift and escape. He exited the phone booth onto the streets of London and immediately lit up a cigarette, taking in a long-drag and exhaling slowly. He trudged over to the stone facade of the Ministry and leaned his back against it. Taking another drag he slid down the wall into a sitting position, and with his mind finally off the trial he was forced to look at himself in the mirror. 

He’d half expected to be greeted by his friends, not reporters, and it hurt. He knew they couldn’t view the trial, but it hurt to not have them there. He supposed they had a funeral to arrange and were probably grieving too so that made it less bad, but he still felt lonely. One of the down-sides of spending every waking moment with a small number of other people was when they weren’t around anymore. And that reporter’s question had him thinking. He’d killed six people. His response had been true and accurate, but fascists were still human beings, even if one could only ethically remember that once their wands had been taken away.’

They still had loved-ones, people who would miss them, maybe even people who were trying to change them. He’d snuffed out the entire universes of six other people. And necessary as that was, that he could do it without hesitating? What did that say about him?

“Is das alles was ich bin? Eine Maschine, die Faschisten tötet?” He asked himself. 

“I don’t think so, no.” He recognized the voice and looked up mid-puff to see that - he was going to think murder-hobo wizard but seeing him now, it was more thrift-store Tolkein - lanky, wearing threadbare tweed with non-decorative elbow-patches. His accent was British professional class, educated but not rich, and those eyes. They were kind, but the soul behind them had seen things no one should have to see. And he understood German.

“Wer bist du?” Konrad asked. 

“Ich Heisse Remus Lupin, though my German is a bit rusty.” He replied with a slight grin. “I imagine you’re feeling a lot of things right now, but I saw you with Harry in the ministry. That isn’t all you are. Mind if I sit?”

“By all means.” Konrad said, and moved to stamp the cigarette out.

“There’s no need for that, I can’t get cancer and I find I rather like smoky odors.” Remus said, and plopped down next to Konrad unceremoniously. Then Konrad remembered the name. Their Defense Against the Darks Arts professor in third year, also a werewolf. That he loved smoky odors amused Konrad for some reason.

“Danke.” Konrad thanked him taking another drag as he did so. “That trial was… stressful.”

“I can imagine, but you prepared for it well. In advance. And I can imagine you were expecting your friends to be here when you got out and were instead greeted by reporters, feel a bit abandoned, and you’re questioning your worthiness to even be their friend?”

“You’re… not wrong.” Konrad replied.

“I saw you, in that battle, and you know what I saw?” The question was obviously rhetorical. “I saw a brave young man who cares deeply for his friends. One who’s had to cross the rubicon of death, and who takes that burden so those same friends can keep some shred of their innocence for what… maybe a few months? You’re much more than a machine that kills fascists, though the Order does appreciate that aspect of your personality!”

Konrad had to laugh a bit at that last part. “Well it’s good to be appreciated but..”

“Why aren’t they here? Why do you think Mad-Eye extracted you from that press-mobbing? It would have been much worse if they’d been here.”

Konrad hadn’t even considered that, and the realization struck him like lighting; he felt like a shit. “Ah. That makes sense.” 

Remus chuckled and stood up. “Plus, due to an old protection spell he doesn’t know about, Harry is stuck at the Dursley’s for another week.”

Konrak cocked an eyebrow. “I see… is it possible for him to have visitors?”

Remus’ grin became a bit wolfish “Certainly, if you can put up with his relatives or find a way to make them less… boorish. I can apparate you straight there if you’d like. After that though, we have some business to take care of, you and we.”

Konrad had a pretty good idea what that business might be, but he wasn’t about to vocally speculate. “I’d like that. We have some things we need to talk about.”

“Then take my arm.” This time, Konrad did put out the cigarette, and took Remus Lupin’s arm.

* * *

The two wizards reappeared in a perfectly normal backyard. There was a vegetable garden, populated by small ceramic lawn gnomes that weren’t in any way magical. An obese man with a walrus mustache was mowing the grass and immediately jumped up, screamed, and ran inside. 

“Harry! Some of your freak friends are here! They are not to come in the house!”

“Mr. Dursley, his uncle.” Remus noted dryly. There were thumping sounds and Harry burst out the back door, then momentarily stopped cold. He had such a strange look on his face as he put one foot in front of the other. Konrad didn’t know if he was actually walking that slowly or if time slowed down, but seeing him for the first time since the battle Konrad was suddenly struck with a wave of guilt. 

It was his fault that Sirius was dead. He was so scared of losing his friend that he’d misjudged the angle and gotten that same friend’s Godfather killed. Harry got within a meter or so and stopped.

“Harry I’m…” he had a knot in his throat that made it hard to speak. “I’m sorry about Sirius. It was my fault, I tried to interpose Dolohov and thought she was having a go at you rather than him.” 

Harry didn’t say anything for a long moment he just crushed Konrad in a bear hug. “You tried, Konrad. You couldn’t have known.” Harry’s own voice cracked “He would have wanted you to make that call. I was so afraid you’d end up in Azkaban.”

“So was I.” Konrad confessed. “But it would have been worth it to get rid of that Arschgeige”

After a moment, Harry let go, and Konrad remembered something. “I didn’t have a chance to pass this off to you.” Konrad retrieved the prophecy from his coat pocket. He was confined, never searched. He’d only had to surrender his wand, thanks to Dumbledore’s intervention.

Harry gingerly plucked the little glowing orb out of Konrad’s hand and peered at it. “I don’t know how to access it.” He said after a long second. 

“I doubt it’s difficult, but you should do it privately. Not here, at least not out in the open.” Konrad cautioned him. 

“Hmm. Let’s go inside then. My room should be private enough.” Harry suggested and Konrad nodded. 

“I’ll be back shortly. Order business.” Remus said seconds before he disapparated.

As soon as they were inside, they were accosted by Uncle Vernon who got up from fanning himself on an easy chair in the living room and charged practically screaming down the hall. “I told you none of your freaks friends were to enter the house!”

Konrad wasn’t having any of that. He stepped in front of Harry and raised his wand. Uncle Vernon made a rather pathetic cry of fear and tried to stop, but instead he slipped on the hardwood floor and fell backwards. Konrad stepped forward and pointed the wand at Vernon’s face.

“Harry is too nice a person to deal with you as you deserve. I am not. You will treat my Waffenbruder with dignity and respect. Verstehst du?”

There was a rapidly expanding wet patch between Vernon Dursley’s legs. “Yes…” he whimpered.

“Good.” 

Konrad could see the cupboard Harry used to live under, until some other wizard threatened the Dursleys into letting him live in an actual room. They both walked over it as they went up the stairs and once they were on the landing Harry finally spoke.

“Thanks. I’m still underage so he thinks he can get away with being a tosspot.” He said.

“You’re welcome. And do tell me if he backslides.” Konrad stage-projected his voice “If he does, I have some transfiguration spells I would like to try out! I bet he would love to be a park bench for a week!”

Harry snickered and opened the door to his room. “What does that mean anyway, Waffenbruder?” 

“Literally, brother in arms. It’s usually used by soldiers in the same unit but I use it a bit differently, I just don’t know a better term.” Konrad didn’t really know how to explain. “We’ve both been through similar kinds of living hell.” Both wizards plopped down on Harry’s bed.

“I think I understand.” Harry nodded. “Because of what we’ve both been through together and separately, you’ve informally adopted me as a sibling. Like Ron and Hermione have but… different.”

“Something like that. But I’m an oly child so sort of winging the big brother thing.” He paused and remembered something. “Speaking of those two, did you ever tell them?”

Harry shook his head, blushing a bit. “No. They’re not obvious about it, I don’t think they realize it, but they’ve been courting each other like swans for years. I don’t want to get in the middle of that. Might mess it up.”

Konrad shrugged. He’d noticed the body language, he thought it would go over well. “Up to you. Though my advice still stands.”

“But as you said, _Waffenbruder_ , I should not come to you for life advice.” Harry gave him a slightly wry grin, but it was tinged with sadness. 

"And yet, you do it anyway..." Konrad remarked.

"Well sure, I don't have an actual older brother whose advice I can ask for and disregard." Harry gave him a wry smirk. "Besides, I can't exactly talk about that with Mrs. Weasley." Which Konrad thought was a fair point. It would be awkard to take about one's romantic interest in both her son and her son's nascient girlfriend. “Anyway, let’s see about this prophecy. It’s probably something simple…” Harry took out his wand and tapped the orb.

“Revelio”

For a second, nothing happened. But then the light faded into clouds that formed the outline of a familiar face: Professor Trelawney. She began to speak with a voice that boomed like thunder.

_"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies...."_

“Tom… wanted this?” Harry asked the universe. “Why? He already went after me in the cradle?” He reached up, and torched the lightning bolt scar on his forehead. “He marked me out as his equal alright. Fulfilling the terms while trying to get around the prophecy.”

“Someone needs to read Oedipus.” Konrad joked dryly, and Harry cocked an eyebrow. “Greek tragedy. An oracle told the king his son would kill him, so he abandons his son, who grows up, meets him on the road, and kills him in a fight over meaningless bullshit.”

Harry managed a snicker. “So trying to change your destiny just ends up causing your downfall.” Then his smile became darker, and turned into a worried grimace. “Neither can live while the other survives… Not much I can even think of can change that.”

“And it has to be you that kills him.” Konrad said. “Can you do it?”

Harry nodded “I think so. But it won’t be because I hate him. I can’t hate him, now. He’s too pathetic to hate. It’s more like…” He searched his mind for an analogy “a rabid dog that needs to be put down to protect everyone else, and put out of its misery. What I don’t get is what power I have that he doesn’t.” Harry stood up and wrapped the glass orb up in a pillow case, swung it around, and then slammed it against the bed-post, shattering it. After he was done ensuring that Voldemort would never get the prophecy’s second half, Harry slumped back down next to Konrad.

“Sometimes you’re so dense it’s funny, Harry. You’ve already told him what that power is. He’s a broken sociopath, and you’re not.”

* * *

Remus Lupin apparated them into the middle of a marsh in water about knee-height. Konrad took everything in, committing the whole area to memory so he could get back on his own, even if he didn’t know where he was.

“Where are we?” He asked. 

“The Burrow, in Devon.” Remus replied, looking around with a fond smirk. “You can’t see it over the grasses, but follow me. You’ll understand.” 

Konrad shrugged and did following behind Lupin until they got out of the shallow spot and up onto a dyke, which when he saw the house. It looked like an old yeoman’s abode that successive generations had added onto obsessively, adding several other houses on top of the original in ways that were architecturally impossible, but nonetheless it, the barn, and it’s extensive gardens were lovingly tended and he could hear the faintest hint of laughter from inside. 

“This is Ron’s house, isn’t it?” Konrad asked. 

“How’d you guess?” Remus confirmed.

“I don’t know it just seems like a warm and slightly… ramshackle place that someone like him and is siblings would have been raised.” Konrad paused. “Except for Percy, there is no accounting for that one.” 

Remus laughed pretty hard at that one. “No, no there is not.”

When they got closer to the house, somewhat emerged. A woman with reddish brown hair, a bit on the plump side wearing simple but comfortable looking robes who was probably in her forties. Konrad guessed, with overwhelming confidence, that she was Mrs. Weasley. He kinda knew her by Ron’s description as a bit of a dragonlady, and Harry’s as being overly protective so Konrad had no idea what to expect, given that he’d dragged her son and Harry into that nightmare in he Department of Mysteries. Well, didn’t drag, necessarily, but certainly enabled. She approached, looking a bit tired and stopped in front of him and Remus.

“I should be terribly upset with you for dragging my son into that fracas…” She said, a bit sternly. “And Harry… but I know these boys and there was no stopping them. From what they tell me, you didn’t flinch to put yourself in harm’s way to protect them. So you’re welcome in the Weasley home any time.” She leaned forward and kissed his forehead, then whispered. “Plus, Dolohov killed my brothers. Thank you for avenging them.

Konrad knew the kind of pain she must have felt, all too well, and he blushed. “It was my pleasure ma’am. You’re welcome.”

Mrs. Weasley turned around and shouted louder than any human being had any right to. “Ron, Ginny, Fred, George! Konrad’s here!” There was the dragonlady Ron both loved and feared.

“Would you like to join us for dinner?” Mrs. Weasley asked.

“And turn down your cooking Molly? I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lupin said, spreading his arms and giving her a hug. “It’s good to see you.”

She hugged him back “Things have been a might chaotic since the funeral.”

“Has Minister Scrimgeour fully mobilized the Aurors?” Konrad asked, paused “And of course I’ll join you for dinner.”

“He has.” Remus answered the question, letting Molly go. “But there’s not enough of them and not all of them are trustworthy. The Dark Lord has been recruiting heavily among the...lower-classes of pure blood wizards, and there are a lot of them.”

“We can talk business after dinner. Come on in, say hi to the boys and Ginny, Arthur should be home soon.”

* * *

Konrad entered the house right after Lupin and looked up. Where the roof used to be, there was simply an open space going up into the higher floors, where various rooms were arranged concentrically. There wasn’t any one set of stairs that went continuously up and he imagined it might be a bit of a maze. 

Ron and Hermione were waiting for him, almost in ambush, but for some reason Konrad felt so safe in the Weasley home that he didn’t freak out when Hermione pounced. He was however almost knocked over by the flying hug.

“Oof!” Konrad exclaimed. “Good to see you too Hermione.”

“I was terribly worried that the Ministry would railroad you like they tried with Harry.”

“Oh, Fudge’s pets tried. They disappeared the copies of the evidence. Thankfully, Professor McGonagall had the originals…”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier that you come from a country with the Stasi.” Hermione said, a bit ruefully. 

“You and me both!’

Dinner was simply amazing. Molly made the best Shepard’s pie that he’d ever had. He suspected because, unlike the Elves at Hogwarts, she wasn’t a slave.

“So Konrad,” Ron asked while stuffing his face “what are your summer plans? Going to go back to Germany for a tour of duty striking back against the people’s enemies?” Somehow, despite having lamb and potato filling his cheeks like a squirrel, he managed to convey that he was teasing. 

“Don’t tempt me Ron. Besides I have enough class-traitors right here in the United Kingdom. And a better chance at doing some good here, at least right now.” He winked. “At least some of the summer is going to be spent on a certain Caribbean island.”

“Oh? Going on Holiday are you?” Arthur Weasley asked.

“After a fashion.” Konrad said. “My boyfriend was… badly injured last year. I go see him whenever I can.” 

For a second, Arthur looked confused, like two concepts didn’t fit. But Hermione made the save.

“He’s gay, Mr. Weasley.” She explained. And using the word seemed to snap him out of the momentary confusion. 

“Oh! Right! Sorry, it’s just not very common for wizards to be open about that. Open secrets most of the time.”

“Gay huh?” George said. “I never imagined him for the type, did you Fred?”

“Can’t say I did George, can’t say I did. Konrad’s wand work was always solid, no limp-wrist at all.”

“Boys!” Molly was red in the face, and even those two flinched. Konrad laughed, though, which took the wind out of her anger.

“It’s alright Mrs. Weasley, they were taking the piss, and I have a sense of humor about myself. Besides, let me tell you about the Sacred Band of Thebes.” Which Konrad did at some length before finishing. “Though the less said about the other greek city states, the better.”

“Oh!” Mr. Weasley became very excited. “That’s right, you’re muggleborn aren’t you? And Hermione tells me that you have some expertise when it comes to muggle listening devices?”

“Ja, and I suppose I do.” Konrad replied. 

“Splendid! Splendid! So let me ask you…” Arthur Weasley then launched into a series of questions that were based on so much ignorance that Konrad thought he was schizophrenic. It was mad even by wizard standards. Most wizards at least knew what electricity was. And he worked for the Abuse of Muggle Artefact Department? Konrad tried to field the questions and correct him, but he had to look around for help. Ron looked mortified, Hermione looked embarrassed for Mr. Weasley. 

But Molly winked at him, while Fred, George, and Remus were visibly suppressing laughter, which was when Konrad got the joke. He didn’t know why exactly Arthur Weasley was having him on, but he rolled with it, giving Mr. Weasley the up-to-date information he was asking for on the sly, including how listening devices could be ‘abused’ by wizards. 

Still, Arthur Weasley was clearly obsessed, and after about fifteen minutes Molly rescued him. 

“So, we have some time before dessert, Konrad, if you’d like some time to recover from my husband… no smoking in the house.” How did she know? 

‘Mutter wissen es immer…’ He thought to himself. It was part of their motherly powers, some sort of sixth sense.

“Danke Mrs. Weasley” Konrad replied a big haggardly, that conversation had taken a lot out of him, and he was also jonesing. He stepped outside, and off the balcony just so nothing wafted into the house, pulled a cigarette out and struck the flint in his zippo. He took a long drag and felt the nicotine go straight to his brain. He looked up as he exhaled. They were far enough away from civilization that the stars were absolutely brilliant, insects and frogs chirped in the fen, it really was a wonderful place, and he imagined, a perfect place to grow up. 

He heard the door open off to his left and glanced over, Mr. Weasley stepped off the balcony and sidled up next to him, a bit apologetically. 

“I’m not actually that mad, you know.” He said a bit sheepishly. “It’s just that I’ve known Hermione and Harry since they were new to their magic. Their whole world got turned upside down when they found out magic was real, and I thought it would be good for their confidence if they could explain things to an adult for a change.”

The lightbulb practically went off in Konrad’s head. “Gott, I wish someone had done that for me. And now that they’re older, you can’t bring yourself to tell them can you?”

“Nope! Plus it’s fun.” There was a plaintiff look on his face that Konrad recognized.

“Don’t worry. Your secret is safe.” Konrad reassured him, taking a long drag.

"Thank you." Arthur said, then paused. "Incidentally, welcome to the Order if you want to join. You're an adult, neither of us have any reason to oppose your induction."

Konrad looked at him with a wolfish grin "You're asking me, a communist, of all people, if I want to join a combat organization devoted to killing fascists?"


End file.
